Tarana Burke

Tarana Burke originated the phrase me too in 2006 while working with Black and brown girl survivors of sexual violence at the youth organization Just Be Inc. in Selma, Alabama. The phrase was already in use within her direct survivor-support practice before it reached global visibility as a hashtag in 2017. She has since founded me too. International, a long-form survivor-advocacy organization that has built programs across the United States and into adjacent international contexts. She is the author of Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement, published in 2021.

Her organizing background spans the early grass-roots youth-development work in Selma, leadership roles at the 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement, and the slow infrastructure-building that turned a survivor-support phrase into a survivor-support organization. She has been named to the TIME 100 list and recognized with awards across the survivor-advocacy and movement spaces specifically.

Her mentor focus is the long arc of movement-organization leadership for organizations that hold a survivor-centered or community-centered mission. The slow work of staying with a community-grounded mission as the organization scales. The risks of mission-drift when external funding and external attention pull toward growth metrics that do not match the program-quality metrics. The infrastructure-building for survivor advocacy specifically — staff training, peer-support protocols, the relationship between survivor leadership and professional clinical practice, and the legal and ethical work of holding survivor stories with the care they require.

Her secondary mentor focus is the public-platform work that comes with becoming the public face of a movement-organization. The decisions about which platforms to engage and which to decline. The discipline of staying with the mission when the platform reach makes adjacent topics tempting. The mental-health and personal-sustainability work that has to ride alongside the public-platform work. The specific work of being a Black woman as the public face of an organization that addresses violence against Black and brown women and girls specifically.

Mentees who book with Tarana come from three primary populations. First: executive directors and senior staff at survivor-advocacy and adjacent mission-driven organizations across the United States and the broader diaspora. Second: emerging organizers in their first three to seven years of movement-organization work who are considering whether to commit to the long arc. Third: established advocates and writers who are considering organization-building as the next chapter of their public-platform work.

Her style is plain. She comes from a background where real survivor support has required clear language, trustworthy relationships, and a refusal to perform what the work actually requires. The same applies in her mentor practice. She does not idealize the work for anyone considering committing to it. She is also generous with the specific operational knowledge that she has built across the long arc of moving from grass-roots practice to organizational leadership.

Outside the direct me too. International work and the mentor practice she serves on the boards of adjacent survivor-advocacy and gender-justice organizations and is a regular speaker on the long arc of movement-infrastructure-building. Her writing appears in long-form essays and interviews more often than in consistent column or Substack form; the writing pace is deliberate.

She is a member of the Social Entrepreneurship Builders network here and contributes to discussion threads on the founder-mental-health and succession-planning topics specifically. Her sessions on the platform are free of session-fee charge in keeping with the community-mentorship orientation she has held across her work; the platform's session-management infrastructure still applies (60-minute booking, pre-session brief required, written follow-up).

The pre-session brief asks: current role and organization, specific mission and survivor population served, the decision in front of the mentee, and one piece of writing the mentee has produced (an organizational document, a public piece, or a working draft) that the mentor can review. She reads the writing before the session. The session is unscripted after that point; she works the specific question. Mentees leave with a written follow-up summarizing the specific resources, contacts, and next-step decisions discussed.

Her perspective on the survivor-advocacy field across the past two decades is grounded in actual operating experience and in the slow expansion of the field since the visible 2017 moment. The institutional funding architecture for survivor-led organizations has improved meaningfully but unevenly. The structural conditions that produce sexual violence in the first place have not improved at remotely the same pace as awareness has grown. Mentors who book with her get a long-arc view that takes both the progress and the structural gap seriously and that does not treat the field's visibility moment as a substitute for the actual work.

On the organizational-form conversation she has specific perspective. The decision between 501c3 structure and adjacent organizational forms is real and has implications for the work the organization can do. She works with founders and senior staff on the specifics of those decisions in light of the particular community served and the particular theory of change the organization holds. The choices have downstream consequences across funding, advocacy capacity, and program structure.

On the question of how to sustain survivor-advocacy leadership across the long arc she is candid. The field has a pattern of founder burnout that has removed senior leaders from the work before their expertise could be fully transferred forward. Her own discipline around sustainability — therapy, rest, the boundaries that protect both her personal life and her institutional capacity to keep doing the work — is part of what she discusses with mentees who are themselves heading into the long arc. The conversation is not abstract; it is operational.

She is also one of the founding contributors to the intergenerational movement-transfer conversation within the broader Black women's movement-organization ecosystem. The slow work of bringing younger organizers into the institutional and knowledge structures that earlier generations built. The protection of organizational continuity through leadership transitions. The honest accounting of what was built well and what was not built well.

Her engagement in the platform's Social Entrepreneurship Builders network includes contributions to discussion threads on the topics of founder mental health, survivor-advocacy infrastructure, and the long-arc work of building movement organizations that center community accountability. She is deliberate about the platforms she engages and the depth of engagement she sustains; the platform's mentor practice is one of the contexts she has chosen for sustained engagement specifically because the structured one-on-one format permits the careful work that survivor-centered mentorship requires.

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.