Alicia Garza

Alicia Garza is one of three co-founders of the Black Lives Matter network, founded in 2013 with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin. She is the principal of the Black Futures Lab and its sister organization Black to the Future Action Fund. Through the Black Futures Lab she has led the Black Census Project, the largest survey of Black people in the United States conducted in over 150 years, with field work spanning multiple cohorts and yielding policy and political-strategy products tied to the data.

Her organizing background spans labor work, particularly with domestic workers through the National Domestic Workers Alliance where she served as Strategy and Partnerships Director for a multi-year period, and the founding of multiple movement infrastructure organizations following the initial BLM network build-out. She is the author of The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart, published in 2020, which is the working manual for the long arc of movement-coalition work she has practiced for over two decades.

Her mentor focus is the long-arc movement strategy, the labor of coalition work, and the work of turning data into Black political power. The strategy work that happens between visible movement moments. The infrastructure-building that creates the capacity for those moments to translate into durable political and policy outcomes. The coalition-building across labor, civic engagement, and movement-organization sectors.

Her secondary mentor focus is the work of movement-organization leadership. The structural decisions about organizational form (501c3 versus 501c4 versus PAC versus network of allied organizations). The fundraising work that supports movement infrastructure across grant, individual donor, and membership-dues models. The team-building work in mission-driven organizations. The succession and leadership-transition work that sustains organizations beyond founder tenure.

Mentees who book with Alicia come from three primary populations. First: executive directors and senior staff at movement-organization and civic-engagement organizations across the United States. Second: policy researchers and data-strategy professionals working at the intersection of movement organizations and electoral politics. Third: emerging organizers in the first three to seven years of movement-organization work considering the long-arc commitment.

Her style is structured. She comes from a labor-organizing background where strategic discipline and long arc thinking are foundational. The mentor session is not a conversation about feelings; it is a conversation about strategy. Mentees who come prepared with specific strategic questions get specific strategic answers.

Outside the direct Black Futures Lab and Black to the Future Action Fund work, the mentor practice, and her writing, she serves on advisory boards of adjacent movement-infrastructure organizations and continues to publish across long-form essay venues and through her own publishing and platform infrastructure. Her podcast Lady Don't Take No has been part of her platform work since 2020.

She is a member of the Social Entrepreneurship Builders network here, contributes to the Reproductive Justice Network on the coalition-work topics, and is occasionally active on the African Women in Tech Leadership network on the topics of data-infrastructure and the relationship between movement organizations and the technology industry. Her sessions are free of session-fee charge in keeping with her movement-mentorship orientation; the platform's session-management infrastructure still applies.

The pre-session brief asks: current role and organizational context, specific strategic question, the decision in front of the mentee, and a one-page strategic-question document. She reviews the brief before the session. The session structure is loose; she works the specific question with the long arc as frame. Mentees leave with written notes summarizing the specific strategic recommendations and follow-up decisions discussed.

Her perspective on the long arc of movement work is grounded in over two decades of direct organizing experience across labor and Black-political-power work. The Black Lives Matter network's evolution from a small online formation in 2013 into the broader network of allied organizations across the subsequent decade has produced structural lessons that mentees benefit from understanding. The decentralized-network model has strengths and limitations. The chapter-based growth has worked differently in different cities. The relationship between original founders and chapter leadership evolved over time and required deliberate renegotiation. She is open about the lessons.

The Black Census Project work that she has led through the Black Futures Lab is one of the most ambitious survey-research undertakings in the Black-American political-research field in recent decades. The first wave reached over thirty thousand respondents; subsequent waves have built on that infrastructure. The methodological discipline of the project — sampling strategy, question-design, the data-publication and data-use protocols — is part of what she works with mentees on when the conversation moves into research-design territory.

On the relationship between movement work and electoral work she holds a clear position. The two are connected and they are not the same. She is candid about the chapters in her career where she has prioritized one over the other and what the trade-offs have been. The Black to the Future Action Fund work specifically is at the intersection — building the political-action infrastructure that movement organizations can deploy into electoral cycles.

Her labor-organizing background through the National Domestic Workers Alliance gives her specific perspective on the labor-and-movement intersection. Domestic-workers organizing has been a long-arc Black-women's labor project that has informed how she thinks about workplace organizing more broadly. Mentees considering labor-and-movement intersections find this vantage point particularly useful.

Her engagement in the platform's Social Entrepreneurship Builders network, the Reproductive Justice Network, and the African Women in Tech Leadership network covers the broad range of her own practice across labor, movement-organization, and the data-infrastructure-meets-political-power work the Black Futures Lab has developed. Her contributions to discussion threads on the topics of coalition-building, Black-women's voter-turnout organizing, and the survey-research methodology of the Black Census Project specifically are deeply engaged and have informed broader strategic work across the platform's adjacent community.

The social-entrepreneurship and mission-driven-organization landscape continues to evolve in ways that affect Black women and African women founders specifically. The funding landscape has shifted across the past decade. The board-and-leadership pipeline has deepened but remains thin relative to the structural need. The succession question is still unevenly resolved across founder-led organizations. The mentor practice connects specifically to the senior-level operational questions and to the long-arc structural conditions of the sector.

The platform's mentor infrastructure brings African and African-diaspora women senior mentors into structured engagement with the next generations of women in their fields. The structured booking permits sustained one-on-one relationships across the long arc of the mentee's career; the platform's broader network and event infrastructure permits broader community engagement alongside the individual mentor relationships. Both are part of the larger infrastructure that this platform is building for the women in this work. The mentor practice is one of the foundational layers.