Join us for The Power of US Speaker Series featuring social change strategist and author Rashad Robinson, whose book From Presence to Power explores what it takes to turn movements for justice into lasting change. Drawing on more than two decades of experience, Robinson challenges us to look beyond visibility and protest to understand how real power and leverage can transform systems, influence decisions, and create meaningful progress.
5:00 PM - 5:30 PM Networking Reception. Lite bites provided!
5:30 PM - 6:30PM Event
Speaker:
For more than two decades, Rashad Robinson’s strategic campaigns, media expertise and movement leadership have played a critical role in winning real change for real people.
Today, through Rashad Robinson Advisors (RRA), he advises and collaborates with foundations, nonprofits and leaders across media, politics, government and business. His aim: to increase their impact by designing effective campaigns, developing innovative media and organizing strategies, guiding strategic investments, and helping them unlock the power of communities to bring about progress.
Rashad’s new book, From Presence to Power: How to Take On the Fights That Matter—and Win, is published by One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House. It has been praised as “a master class in real activism” and “a must-read for anyone who wants to achieve lasting structural change, not just momentary victories and fleeting results.” The book offers something rare in today’s political moment: a clear, strategic roadmap for understanding how power actually works—and how to build and use it for the collective good.
Rashad’s work and insights are regularly featured across broadcast, print and social media, including CNN, MSNBC, BET, NPR, NewsOne, OWN, The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, Essence, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Guardian. He has also been profiled by Fast Company, Ebony, The Root, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Rashad has driven campaigns to shift portrayals in media, win public policy fights, hold corporations accountable by forcing them to change their practices, and build political power in communities that have long been excluded from it. Among those achievements, in 2020, Rashad co-led the largest advertising boycott in history: a 1,000-company boycott of Facebook and Instagram. Starting in 2015, Rashad was instrumental in launching the movement to redefine the role and work of local prosecutors, leading to dozens of subsequent reforms that measurably reduced mass incarceration and many other injustices that have been foundational to the system. Other notable victories include winning bail reform, decarceration, net neutrality, anti-discrimination practices across the tech landscape, inclusive representations across the media landscape, and the elimination of predatory Big Bank fees.
Rashad also served as co-chair of the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder. He won a Webby Award for Best Political Podcast in 2020 and has received numerous honors from organizations across the social change sector. He has also received honorary doctorates from Georgetown University and St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
Across his work, he focuses on helping institutions understand the moment they are in—and how to engage in the type of strategic action that leads to real outcomes.
Moderator:
Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez was named “Hero of the New South” by Southern Living Magazine and People of the Year by Tribeza Magazine. Cristina has spent the last twenty years founding and leading some of the most creative organizations to raise wages, tackle the climate and student debt crises, and fight for immigrant rights.
Cristina is co-founder and Partner at Ascend Strategy Labs - a leading social justice consulting firm that supports mission -driven leaders and organizations achieve unprecedented impact. She is also currently a contributor at ABC News.
Cristina began her social justice career when she was a college student and co-founded Workers Defense Project (WDP), a workers’ rights organization with the mission to win better working conditions for immigrant workers in Texas. She built WDP from a small volunteer project into a statewide organization that was named “one of the most creative organizations for immigrant workers in the country” by The New York Times. She helped lead the organization for over a decade, taking on two of the most powerful special interest groups in Texas – the construction and real estate industries.
After the 2016 election, when Cristina was 6-months pregnant, she founded Jolt — a Texas-wide organization that lifts up the voice, vote, and issues impacting Latinos. Founded in 2016, Jolt seeks to win the nearly 11 million Latinos living in Texas the power and respect they deserve. Jolt’s work has reached tens of millions of Americans, mobilized thousands to action, and built the leadership of young Latinos across Texas.
Most recently, Cristina also served as President of Nextgen America, the nation’s largest youth voting rights organization.
Cristina was a 2020 U.S. Senate candidate and taught at the LBJ School of Public Policy at the University of Texas at Austin.