New America CA Fellows Generated Impact (and Hope) in 2018

“What a terrible time to have a baby,” the nurse said to me. It was early 2017, at my first prenatal appointment for a pregnancy that my wife and I had been working toward for over a year.

The nurse’s words unbalanced me. For one, they made me a bit dubious about my new healthcare provider. More troubling, though, was that in the moment she said them I realized a part of me actually agreed with her. All around us were rising rates of hate speech, rising income inequality, new signs of climate change. Even amidst my joy at becoming a parent, I was deeply anxious about what my child would encounter once he arrived.

After my son was born, I felt my desire to change the status quo shift into a full-on mandate. Kids come into the world vulnerable, curious and full of love: what more could I be doing to create a country worthy of their ready minds, their trusting hearts?

I came to New America CA because it felt like a start to answering to that question. The opportunity to support the New America CA Fellows, in particular, helps me see the progress that local communities continue to make toward a more equitable and compassionate world. The Fellows are doing tangible work that improves people’s lives every day. And they are modeling a style of leadership that we need. It is strategic, persistent, humble, and rooted in the communities it serves, and it gives me new encouragement for the future our children will inherit.

As we reflect on the past year, here’s a look back at some highlights of what the members of the 2018 cohort have accomplished to date. May this new year bring you hope, renewal, and fresh opportunities to bring about the world that you envision!

• Rey Faustino, Founder and CEO of One Degree: Rey traveled the world — from Colombia to the Philippines — spreading the word about his organization’s innovative technology, which better connects low-income families to the social safety net. Rey’s team also shared results from its first Big Data analysis of the information it has collected around low-income people’s access to resources such as food pantries, crisis hotlines, job training, homeless services, and health clinics. This analysis is a first step in giving funders, policymakers and service providers new insight into valuable neighborhood-level data, ranging from which categories people search most to the seasonal shifts in families’ basic needs.
• Fanna Gamal, Education Advocate: Fanna’s advocacy disrupts cycles of generational poverty that steer young people away from meaningful life opportunities and towards institutionalization. In 2018 Gamal designed a series of Claim Your Rights workshops for families at risk of being displaced from the city of Oakland, providing training and technical assistance to help parents advocate for their children in special education matters, school discipline issues, and other situations in which they might feel their children are being under-educated. She also published a piece in the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law outlining current challenges to juvenile justice interventions focused on girls and lectured at the Stanford University School of Education on the collateral consequences of punitive school discipline.
• Lili Gangas, Chief Technology Community Officer at the Kapor Center for Social Impact: Lili led the 10-city “Latinx in Tech” Tour, providing Latinx entrepreneurs with the resources and networks needed to identify tech solutions to issues facing the US Latinx community. She also hosted a Tech Done Right Night that awarded over $30,000 in prizes to organizations making tech more inclusive in Oakland. She spoke extensively about her team’s learnings in building inclusive tech ecosystems, including at the Latinas in Tech Silicon Valley Summit, the UnidosUS conference and the Kauffman ESHIP Summit.
• Nicolas Heidorn, Founder and Director of the California Local Redistricting Project: Nicolas helps local governments establish legislative redistricting commissions, to depoliticize the redistricting process and increase public participation. He drafted Senate Bill 1018, which authorized every local government in California to create an independent redistricting commission and was signed into law in September. He also drafted Long Beach’s Measure DDD, which was voted into law in November; as of that vote, independent redistricting commissions have now spread to five of the ten largest cities in California. His team also launched an online Ordinance Generator which helps users draft their own city or county redistricting ordinance.
• Sonya Passi, Founder & CEO of FreeFrom: Sonya’s innovations around financially empowering survivors of gender-based violence were recognized with a spate of honors this year, from organizations such as the Guggenheim Network for Social Innovation, Ashoka Changemakers, BNY Mellon, the New York Women’s Foundation, the Allstate Foundation, and the Meaning-Centred Design Awards. She shared her work in speeches, podcasts and print, and scaled her organization’s reach via a pilot that gives cryptocurrency safety grants to survivors and via a curriculum for domestic violence organizations seeking to incorporate financial empowerment programming into their work.