issue no. 11: Sabrina Hersi Issa
On building solidarity technology and circulating birthday surveys.
Sabrina Hersi Issa (she/her) is an award-winning human rights technologist, a term she coined and describes as applying a justice framework to how technology and media is built, developed, and shaped. A first-generation Somali-American, Sabrina’s work is focused on global advocacy and media innovation, where she spearheads projects leveraging technology and media to improve access to direct services and press freedom. Sabrina is the founding managing partner of Democracy Well - a movement network and collective fund for democracy, leads Survivor Fund - a political fund focused on championing the rights of survivors of sexual violence, and runs Bold Impact - a lab for world builders. She writes regularly about technology, culture and social issues (check out A Dope Newsletter) and is a nonstop champion for women in technology. Here’s how Sabrina navigates being in the movement for the long haul.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity — March 2025.
On coining the term human rights technologist:
My work as a human rights technologist is using tech and media to expand human dignity and opportunity for everyone, and then doing that in practice through shaping how tech and media is developed. When I was coming up as a developer, everything we were building and all of our strategy was oriented around profit. I found that really extractive and it pushed up against, not just my values, but also why I wanted to do this work in the first place. It sucked the soul out of what I love to do.
When I was first learning how to code, it felt like the most powerful thing in the world. I can imagine something, then plug in some numbers and letters, and it’s there — it was such a beautiful gift. To be in roles where that gift was flattened to just getting people to give us their money, it didn't seem aligned. So, I asked myself, what would it look like to build a body of work that was actually centering my value system? My value system comes from international development and that world is human rights. What would the world look like if technology was built with human rights in the center, where we could expand dignity and opportunities? That's how I describe what I do. I'm really proud of defining my field because, as Toni Morrison said, “Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” As a Black woman coming up in the world, so much of my experience of existing in this country has been other people defining me for me, so it is liberatory to be able to be in a space in my career where I have actually turned this on its side and it's worked. Now other people call themselves human rights technologists.
On the magic of community colleges:
I first started my career as a journalist. I saw media as an amazing form of connection and bridge building. Coming up in this country from Somalia, seeing the way my country was portrayed in our media, and understanding the massive gaps between the story that was being told and the story that I knew was true — there's some big thing in between. That's how I entered the media world. I was coming up in newsrooms at the time where tech was a big disruptor to the business model. I came up on the internet and was part of the first era of “digital native leaders.” I hate that phrase, but in newsrooms I became the young person who loved the internet and became the default tech person. That’s how I backed into being a tech specialist.
When I left newsrooms, I got a job working at an NGO that had five women-led radio stations across the five provinces in Afghanistan. I wanted to work in Afghanistan, because I saw parallels between what was happening in Afghanistan and what has happened in Somalia. I wanted to work in Somalia eventually, so I figured this is a similar context I can get experience in. Two months before I started the role, the NGO filed for bankruptcy. I went back to my research, found another organization that had an independent radio station, and pitched myself over email. I ended up getting a role similar with another Afghan NGO that had offices in Kabul and Kandahar. On my second day of work in Washington, my boss said, "Oh, you know tech. We have all of these legacy projects that we don't have bandwidth to handle. Can you be in charge of this?" This is what happens at most scrappy NGO's, and I said, “Yes, of course,” which is the beginning of so many disproportionate relationships between work and me.
When I looked at the scope of the work of these projects, I realized they were extraordinarily technical projects that required knowing things like how satellites work — my liberal arts understanding and self-taught developer skills did not have the range. On my second day of work, I remember leaving early to go to the local community college. I walked in off the street into some counselor's office and shared that I needed to learn how to program. This woman asked, “Do you even go here?” and then enrolled me in a series of programming classes that I could take at night — she changed my life forever. It gave me a technical skill set that I could take anywhere in the world. And, this woman did it at a time way before distance learning was a thing. I will never know this person's name, but she changed my life. To be able to take myself back to school at night for this specific skill building and invest in myself at a price that was so accessible — community colleges are a jewel in this country. I took these giant programming manuals in my carry-on bags as I flew around the world doing “do good shit,” and it accelerated my life — I had a skill set that wasn't relying on an administration or wasn't relying on a campaign going well. I could do this anywhere for anyone.
On having cadences to her weekdays:
Right now, I run an initiative called Democracy Well, which is a collective fund and national movement network for democracy. I also run Bold Impact, which is a lab for worldbuilders that we run a lot of our social justice initiatives through. And, I started a political fund for sexual violence survivors — it's like the Emily's List for sexual violence survivors — called Survivor Fund. For me to be able to juggle all of this requires systems, practices, and routines that didn't exist when I was mainly consulting and bouncing around the world helping do-gooders.
I live in Los Angeles now, but a lot of my East Coast supremacy reigns — I spent most of my career in DC, New York, and San Francisco but mainly in DC. I wake up early. I go on a hot girl walk first thing in the morning and get fresh air. I try to start and end my day with walks outside. I also love to exercise. Whether I'm working with my trainer or working out on my own, I go to the gym at least six days a week if I'm not traveling. It helps mitigate depression. It makes my mood happy. I love it and I'm thankful for it.
I also have a cadences to my days. On Mondays, I don't do external meetings. I do my wellness shit in the morning. It's a lot of doctor's appointments, checking in with my therapist, and doing internal management. Tuesdays are for team meetings. Wednesdays are external — for programs we're running, funder conversations, strategy stuff, etc. I try to keep Thursdays for longer game strategy thinking to be able to do deep work — it's when I try to meet with my writing group or reserve for things that have a longer arc. I started this practice during the pandemic that we call “do you Fridays” where you just do you — go do something for you and you can tell us about it on our team check-in. That kind of became institutionalized in my life where on Fridays I do reserve that time to check in with people I want to see and talk to. Literally, on my team, they know to not schedule anything for Friday. That's usually the cadence when I’m home.
On juggling travel while raising her niece and nephew:
When I am not home, I'm a monster. I raised my niece and nephew, so I am very accustomed to being out of sync with my peer group. I raised them in a time where a lot of my peers did not have young kids, and also the culture had not met up to the collective care responsibility that really happened during the pandemic, so I did not get a lot of empathy or grace with juggling that responsibility. As a result, when I did have to travel for work, which was significant pre-pandemic, my psychology was, “If I'm not home, every minute has to count.” I overscheduled myself — I still do, but it’s a little bit cooler now. My nephew is 17 and my niece is 12 — they're semi autonomous vehicles; I just have to touch the steering wheel every now and then. When I had to do daycare pickups, that was not the case.
When I would be gone for a week, I would approach it as — land, a car would pick me up, and I would have a meeting in the car. When I would be at a hotel, my morning workout would be a meeting while we work out. Then, I’d go for breakfast and somebody would meet me at breakfast. I would probably have three to four more meetings after that. I'm an introvert and also a lot of the work that I do is sensitive, so these are usually one-on-one conversations. You can't scale intimacy like that. Lunch would be a meeting, and then three or four more meetings after that. When I was in DC, I would have multiple dinners, so I would have dinner one and dinner two. I never told other people I was doing this, but I would have hard stops. It would mostly be work conversations, some friend conversations, but it was working. It took me a really long time to reconcile that as work, because when my father came to this country, we started over — he was a cab driver, a security guard, was in the military, was a diplomat, and he started a small business. My mom is a nurse. In my mind, that is labor. Me jumping around in New York for a week having tons of meetings and conversations — it took me a minute to recalibrate that as work.
Thankfully, the pandemic stopped all of that. Now when I’m traveling, it is a different orientation. I orientate to my wellbeing. When my niece and nephew were young and I was trying to maximize every minute I wasn't home to make that matter on the back end, it worked, but it came at the cost of a lot of my wellbeing. When every meal you're having is out or when you aren't able to have time with yourself, all of that adds up. And also, sometimes it wasn't just in New York — sometimes I was in Iraq, Afghanistan, or other places that were hard. One of the things that I am thankful for is that now I have the agency and seniority expertise where I don't have to do that anymore. I can design my travel to be sustainable to my work and my vision where it's not in reaction to, but it's in service of.
On making a decision and then making that decision right:
During the recent wildfires in LA, there was a moment I was briefly kind of stuck. I was questioning, “Do I go?” and I remembered a lesson. When you do a lot of humanitarian work, you have to get hazard insurance. In order to get qualified for hazard insurance, you need to go through certain disaster courses where they kidnap you or have you take quizzes on decision-making. I remembered a workshop that I took that shared that people who survive plane crashes don't survive because they're sitting waiting for help to come. They survive because they're making moves. They stay moving. It's not about making a good decision or bad decision — it's about making a decision and then making that decision right. In January, when I was in the evacuation zone and then I had to evacuate from where I evacuated because the fire spread, I was stalled for a minute. Do I go? You always go. You keep it moving, and then you'll make it okay. I only have regrets when I stay stuck.
On reckoning with authoritarianism:
It's hard to exist in this moment and not think about it from a personal lens. There is a personal existential examination, and then there's also a broader fact that we have to locate ourselves personally in a broader movement. It's also interesting for me because this isn't my first rodeo — I am from a country that has experienced authoritarianism. I work very closely with friends and colleagues around the world who are living and have lived and survived this. The thing that feels practiced to me is existing through reckonings. We are all holding ourselves through a personal reckoning, but I'm witnessing our culture have a broader reckoning. My experience in reckonings is you can't ignore it — it will only demand more from you. It also reminds me a lot of grief, and you can't ignore grief. We lost an election, but we're also grieving a country and a sense of identity. That's the reckoning piece. What are we going to make of that? For me, it's so interesting to also be around people asking, “What do I do?” As a strategist, my profession is telling people what to do, but in practice I'm like, “What do you mean? Keep doing what you do.” You have to keep going but dress it up in a way where there is more resolution and rootedness to why you’re doing what you're doing.
On building solidarity technology:
I believe this is an amazing moment to be in solidarity as a technologist. I am building out the framework for “solidarity technology,” which I define as the exercise in practicing possibility. In this moment, I want to practice the possibility of a democracy that works for all of us. I want to practice the possibility of a democracy that loves all of us. I want to use my skill set to transform civic institutions from weapons of oppression into systems of support, love, and care. That's how I'm meeting this moment. My work days need to orient back to that North Star. Otherwise, the reckoning I need to face is why am I not living my values?
I appreciate futurists, because one of the key things we're missing is we have a tendency to only focus on change and impact in campaign cycles — in two to four year cycles. I appreciate futurists because they've moved that dial way the hell out there. We desperately need to be thinking about things in generations, because that is legacy building and legacy building branches out beyond technology. The way I look at solidarity tech though, is it replaces incrementalism with interconnectedness, and that's the nuance. It's less about being time bound and more about being experiential.
On what’s holding our movements back:
I became an activist because the systems that my family and I navigated in this country were unnecessarily inhumane mainly because we were Black, poor, and Muslim. I found that unfathomable, and the work to transform those systems didn't really live in any explicit place or space, but any kind of changemaking work also dovetailed you to activism. I didn't choose activism, activism chose me. So, the first thing that we're missing is the fact that it is structures and systems that we're navigating, changing, and trying to transform. Second, there's the fear of change, loss, and the absence of resources. There's a lot of scarcity in movement and, again, that goes into a systems thing. But, ultimately, the war is always at home and the first step to building a better world is defining for ourselves who we want to be in that world. A lot of movement bypasses that and as a result is not rooted or anchored into core operating principles that it can circle back to when things get hard.
On busting through the “perfect activist” standard with core operating principles:
We need to skip assigning morality to doing shit and and lean into acceptance that you will get it wrong. And then what? What happens after you get it wrong? Is it a shame spiral or is it a learning experience? Understand your place in the resilience cycle. I have core operating values and then I have operating actions, and the reason why they're separate is because how I know I'm living my values is through my actions. My operating values are very short: We value our well-being. We protect our energy. We invest in growth. We show up for love. We give ourselves peace. Then, I pair that to a set of operating actions: We sleep eight hours a night. We love to exercise. We do not blame ourselves for bad outcomes. We show up for ourselves and for people we love. I want to be very clear these are “we” statements. I will not be partnered with somebody who is not sharing these values. If I'm with somebody who is not equally invested in my growth as I am theirs, we are not together.
On base building being difficult by design:
I also have a rule: When there’s choice in the matter, I do not choose to be in close working relationships with people I don't trust and respect. It has to be an “AND” because when it’s an “OR,” something is off. If I really respect you, but I don’t trust you, we can't do much with that. When I trust you, but you haven't really done much, I don't really respect you. That's also a trade-off I can’t really make. When it's trust and respect, I find those relationships to be so durable, transformative, and we can do rigorous work together. That’s one way I'm able to have a container to hold contradictions, because it's a really strong container.
The other piece of this is sometimes you don't have a choice or sometimes you’re working in a bigger field where you can't control the group dynamics. It's not a small intimate group you're trying to do stuff with — it's a bigger, broader movement. The systems we're attempting to transform were intentionally designed to be resistant to someone like me holding power, transforming power, and being in power. I experience that resistance as a natural arc of leadership, and I have to be weathered for that. I don't experience it as a contradiction, but I experience it as part of the UX for transformative social change. This is supposed to be hard. So, how are we going to navigate hard? I have had experiences where I was less equipped both as a leader and then also emotionally resourced, and I've had experiences where I'm proud of how I showed up. The thing that I hold with both myself and my team is I want us to do work that we're proud of, and I want us to have fun. The work is not always going to have the outcome that we want, but I want us to at least be proud of what we brought to the table. When there are gaps where we're doing things and I don't feel proud of them, that's something I have to sit with. But the broader experience of resistance to change, that is actually by design.
On navigating relationships where there is *not* trust and respect:
The thing about electoral politics is there are no forever friends and there are no forever enemies. I'm also here for the long arc. I hope for change, but all I can control is how I show up and keep my side of the road clean. When I'm able to acknowledge something isn’t about me, it’s about them, and practice all of the things that we say we do to understand a person, people or group, then I have to resource myself in a way to navigate the dynamic with respect and grace.
I had to go to a meeting where I knew I was actively hated. They were saying, “Yeah, we’re great,” but I knew they hated me. It was emotional, because it was the first time in a very long time that I knew I was going into not friendly territory. Even my therapist said, "Sometimes you just have to go to a thing for work.” What I did going into that was to resource myself. This meeting was in a state that one of my board members lives in. I asked my board member to come and stay with me. I had some other colleagues whom I put meetings around and asked them to come have dinner with me and to meet my board member. But you want to know what I did that was a real game changer? I created a travel altar. I wish I had done this before because one of the things I also struggled with was loneliness when I was traveling all the time for work. I felt very disconnected — when you live everywhere, you live nowhere. Someone had gifted me one of those travel tarot decks. I had a scarf that had been blessed, snacks, and oils that I set up in my hotel. Every day over the course of this work trip, I pulled out a card, I took a picture of it, and I sent it to my group text. It became how I documented that trip, and I felt so connected to my people when I was dealing with people who are not my people. Again, the war is at home. The radical act is noting that I matter in this, too. When I'm whole, I can come to this work as whole, and then we can meet each other as whole people. That way we're both resourced to do hard shit together.
On building and not just dismantling:
When you are holding power in systems that never wanted you to exist, people are going to respond viscerally. The system will revolt, and it will experience you as the problem. That's doing what systems do when systems are being agitated for change.
I'm not here for the military industrial complex, but I think there are great learnings one can take from the most diverse organization in the country - which is the United States military - and how you organize large groups of people to a shared vision (all of the problematic asterisks with that). I've learned there's this thing called the counterinsurgency field manual and the phrase, “it takes a network to defeat a network.” I view white supremacy as the original Al Qaeda — it cares about power, it's deeply entrenched, it's deeply networked, and it's also mostly invisible. When they were doing counterinsurgency field theory to undermine and dismantle Al Qaeda, one of the things they weren’t doing was building a new network. When there's a network that exists, we need to build a new one to replace it because in its absence, when you're dismantling but not building anything in its place, people will only experience its loss. And in loss, you get all of the things that come with the resistance — the harm, the contradictions, all of that. What would it mean if as you're dismantling, you're building what comes next and you're building a network of people who believe in that vision that comes next?
When I’ve had the most moments of, “Oh, this is harmcausing,” while navigating my leadership experiences, it’s because of the second piece - I didn’t put the new network in place. We can chant “no,” cancel that, fire that, cut that, but what are we saying “yes” to? And then, how are we networking that? How are we building infrastructure for what's next? So that it's not just a hype cycle that we're living through — that the network is going to be there for the next one and the one after that. For me, that is a massive tool for navigating anyone who's asking, “Is this causing more harm than good?" That's a question that has to be asked, and the next thing is, “Okay, how are we telling the story of what we're saying ‘yes’ to?” How are we networking that? What network are we building in replace of the old? Why are we always waiting until the stakes are so high, saying, "Fire him. Don't vote for that.” But, who are we putting in its place? We are all drinking from the same toxic culture. It becomes a piece of power building but also culture change. It goes back to solidarity is practicing possibility upon imperfections. Possibly causing harm is part of that but also learning from that and iterating from that. You can't just say, “I caused harm, oops,” and stop. Okay, then what comes next, then what comes next, and then what comes next? That's the longer arc.
On hope practices during rising authoritarianism:
Children always are a source of hope for me. I love being around kids because of the way they look at the world — I want that. The other piece is art and artists — seeking beauty and being with people where there’s laughter. For me, laughter signals a safe home and a safe place —like loud laughter, especially in this moment of fascism and authoritarianism we're navigating. The attack on arts is so explicit and direct, so I am seeking hope and joy from artists who are still making and creating in these moments, paying for that art, and resourcing that art. More than anything, I’m cultivating my own joy practices and integrating that into my life where it just is what we do. My father passed away 15 years ago - he was the love of my life and the most incredible person ever. I feel like I'm good in the world when I'm out living well and I'm loving people well because he loved people well. He loved to celebrate, so don’t tempt me with a good time. I will come to anything you're celebrating — I’ll be there.
On taking personal inventory days and sending birthday surveys:
I have a monthly practice called a “personal inventory day.” It started because I have birthday blues — my brother died around my birthday and we had a close birthday. I also kept having this thing where ahead of my birthday, I had all these goals I wanted to do but how could I do that in a week? So, I started this practice — My birthday is April 16th and on the 16th of every month, I take a personal inventory day. On that day, I check in on my personal goals. I look at who I met with, talked to, and who I learned something from last month. I write them a note and write all of my gratitude notes on that day. I also do personal maintenance like doctor's appointments. But more than anything, I spend that day as a check-in on me, the state of Sabrina: How are you? Who are you? Who are you grateful for? Tell them that. The other thing I do is look at a list of people’s birthdays coming up next month and schedule their notes or gifts a month in advance. It’s like a monthly personal oil change. It has been such a great way of systematizing care for myself and the people who matter to me in my life. The systems I grew up navigating were inhumane, and I feel like the most radical thing I can do is design systems in my life that are full of my humanity.
I also have this thing called the “birthday survey.” It’s a survey I first sent on my 35th birthday to people I knew were older than me who I respected and cherished. I wanted to know: What do I have to look forward to? What are some things you'd be thinking about if you were me? It was so great and so valuable. I received a couple responses that changed my life. The other piece that I really love is that it sparked other people to do surveys. Now, I get invites from my friends who are having milestone birthdays who send me their surveys. Up until then, most people were just doing happy birthday notes on Facebook. In the survey, people really share themselves with me and I print it out to return to. I really appreciated that initial survey because it was radical generosity. That’s the thing - where are you creating portals of generosity for people to pour into you? I love being able to source hope in these moments of magic.
🤎 Check out more of Sabrina’s work on her website and be sure to subscribe to A Dope Newsletter. Follow Sabrina on your platform of choice whether that’s Instagram, Bluesky, Mastodon, or LinkedIn. Be sure to check out the next Rights x Tech event to explore the intersections of technology and power.
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