Technology and Organizing for Racial Justice

Join us for a discussion of the ways that technology and organizing can advance racial justice with Ai-jen Poo, an award-winning activist, thought leader, and social innovator, and a leading voice in domestic workers’ rights and family care advocacy. The lecture will be followed by a conversation with Director of Stanford’s Digital Civil Society Lab, Lucy Bernholz.

Ai-jen Poo is the Executive Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and the Co-Director of Caring Across Generations.

NDWA recently launched Alia, the first portable benefits platform, for house cleaners, enabling access to benefits that are multi-contributor, prorated and portable. Alia is both a benefits solution for the millions of domestic workers in the United States and a powerful organizing tool.

As co-founder of the Domestic Workers United (DWU), a city-wide, multiracial organization of domestic workers, Ms. Poo helped lead the way to the passage of the nation’s first Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2010, historic legislation that extends basic labor protections to over 200,000 domestic workers in New York state.

Ms. Poo’s numerous accolades include recognition as a 2014 MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellow, a 2013 World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and was named to TIME magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2012, as well as Newsweek’s 150 Fearless Women list that same year.

In 2015 she was recognized as one of Fortune.com’s World’s 50 Greatest Leaders and the NonProfit Times Power & Influence Top 50 lists in 2015 and 2016. Her work has been featured in many publications, including Marie Claire, The New York Times, Washington Post, TIME, Glamour, and CNN.com. She is author of The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America. Follow her on Twitter at @aijenpoo.

Lucy Bernholz is a Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and Director of the Digital Civil Society Lab. She has been a Visiting Scholar at The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and a Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, the Hybrid Reality Institute, and the New America Foundation. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including the annual Blueprint Series on Philanthropy and the Social Economy, the 2010 publication Disrupting Philanthropy, and her 2004 book Creating Philanthropic Capital Markets: The Deliberate Evolution. She is a co-editor of the forthcoming volume Digital Technology and Democratic Theory. She writes extensively on philanthropy, technology, and policy on her award winning blog, philanthropy2173.com