Stacey Abrams

Stacey Abrams served as Minority Leader of the Georgia House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017, the first Black person and the first woman to lead either party in the Georgia General Assembly. She founded Fair Fight in 2018 and the New Georgia Project in 2014, organizations focused on voter protection, civic engagement, and expanding the electorate in Georgia and across the South. She is a Yale Law graduate, holds a Master of Public Affairs from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT Austin, and has practiced as a tax attorney specializing in tax-exempt organizations. She has also published novels under the pen name Selena Montgomery and under her own name, including the political thriller While Justice Sleeps and its sequels, and the non-fiction books Our Time Is Now and Lead from the Outside.

She has run for Governor of Georgia twice — in 2018, where she became the first Black woman to win a major party's gubernatorial nomination in any state, and in 2022. Across both campaigns and in the intervening years she built voter-engagement and civic-infrastructure work that has been credited with significant electoral shifts in Georgia and influence across other Southern states.

Her mentor focus is the long arc of civic-infrastructure building and the policy-to-practice bridge. The operational work of building voter-protection and voter-engagement organizations that endure across election cycles. The fundraising and donor-relationship work for civic organizations. The policy-development work that translates campaign positions into actionable legislation or actionable executive action. The decisions about which fights to take and which to defer in a long arc of advocacy and electoral work.

Her secondary mentor focus is the discipline of running for and holding public office while Black and woman. The campaign-launch decisions. The donor-network build-out. The campaign-team hiring. The opposition-research preparation. The media-relations strategy. The long arc of name-recognition building. The decision about whether to run for a specific office at a specific moment, and the patience required to hold that decision through multiple cycles when timing does not align.

Mentees who book with Stacey come from three primary populations. First: women in their first three campaigns for local, state, or federal office across the United States. Second: executive directors and senior staff at voter-protection and civic-engagement organizations. Third: senior policy professionals considering transitions from staff work to electoral candidacy or to executive-director positions.

Her style is precise. She comes from a legal and policy background and the analytical structure shows in how she works mentee questions. She holds high standards for preparation and she expects mentees to arrive ready with specific decisions in front of them. She is generous on the specific operational knowledge and economical with general inspirational framing.

Outside the direct Fair Fight work, the New Georgia Project work, and her novel-writing practice, she serves on boards of adjacent civic and democratic-infrastructure organizations and continues to publish across political opinion, legal scholarship, and fiction. Her platform engagement is selective and consistent with the long arc of building durable infrastructure rather than chasing news-cycle attention.

She is a member of the Social Entrepreneurship Builders network here and contributes to discussion threads on the topic of building durable nonprofit infrastructure and on the topic of the policy-to-practice bridge. Her sessions are free of session-fee charge in keeping with her civic-mentorship orientation; the platform's session-management infrastructure still applies.

The pre-session brief asks: current role, specific campaign or organizational situation, the decision in front of the mentee, and a one-page document on the specific question (a campaign plan, a fundraising strategy, a piece of pending legislation, a hiring decision). She reviews the brief before the session. The session structure is fifteen minutes context-setting, twenty-five minutes working the specific question, and five minutes of action items and follow-up. Mentees leave with written notes summarizing the specific actions and contacts discussed.

Her perspective on Georgia and Southern civic infrastructure is grounded in over a decade of direct operational work across two gubernatorial campaigns and continuous voter-engagement work between them. The Southern political-geography conversation has shifted meaningfully over that period. The voter-suppression infrastructure that operates across multiple Southern states is real and ongoing; the countervailing voter-engagement and protection infrastructure has matured but remains under-resourced relative to the structural scale of the challenge. Mentees considering civic-engagement work in the South get an honest accounting of both sides.

On the relationship between Black women's electoral and movement work she holds a specific view. The two are connected and they are also distinct. The Black women's voter-turnout work that has been credited with electoral shifts in Georgia and in adjacent states has been organizational and operational, not just symbolic. The slow work of building the actual voter-contact infrastructure — field directors, organizers, the data systems, the trust within communities being engaged — is the work behind the visible results. She is candid about what that work has required.

On the candidate-versus-organizer choice she is specific. Some Black women considering the long arc of public service are deciding between running for office and building durable organizational infrastructure that supports many candidacies. The two paths are different. Her own trajectory includes both. She works with mentees on calibrating the right choice for the moment and the right sequence between them.

Her writing practice across novels, non-fiction, and adjacent platforms is part of how she has sustained her own work. The novels under her own name and under Selena Montgomery are not parallel tracks to the political work; they are part of the same intellectual practice. The writing has shaped how she thinks about the political work and the political work has shaped her fiction. Mentees who write alongside their political or organizational work find her perspective on integrating the two especially useful.

Her engagement in the platform's Social Entrepreneurship Builders network includes contributions to discussion threads on the topics of durable nonprofit infrastructure, voter-engagement organization-building, and the specific operational questions of running for office while Black and woman. Her perspective on the Southern civic-engagement work is one of the most-engaged contributions the network has received, and the structured mentor sessions she offers are correspondingly rigorous in their preparation expectations and follow-up documentation.

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.