Deja Foxx is a 20 year old activist, feminist, strategist, and influencer leading thought at the intersection of social justice and social media. She is the founder of GenZ Girl Gang, a student at Columbia University, and a Digital Creator with Ford Models. At just 19, she was the youngest staffer across the 2020 Presidential campaigns while working for Kamala Harris as Influencer and Surrogate Strategist. She has gone on to build innovative digital strategies for nonprofits and serves as the Social Media Director at Acronym, an oranization building digital infrastructure for the modern progressive movement.
From homelessness in high school to the forefront of the digital oranizing and the reproductive justice movement, Deja is changing the world at 20 years old. She’s been named a Teen Vogue 21 under 21, joined the Dazed 100, received Planned Parenthood Catalyst for Change Award, and helped more than 4,000 teens access care in her hometown through the El Rio Reproductive Health Access Project she founded in 2017.
Long Bio:
Deja Foxx is a 20 year old activist and organizer from Tucson, Arizona. She was raised by a single mother, but due to issues of substance abuse found herself homeless at just 15 years old. Deja used this adversity to fuel her activism. Seeing how her school's outdated sex education system disadvantaged her and students like her she began her fight for comprehensive sex education reform and embarked on the organizing campaign that would spark a lifelong passion. After 6 months of organizing, storytelling, and lobbying school board members, Deja and her peers won a unanimous victory in favor of comprehensive sex education in their city's largest school district.
The following year in the wake of the election, Deja scaled up her work. In efforts to protect Title X funding (which she and millions of other low-income women used to access birth control with no-copay) she confronted her senator at a town hall. The video of this confrontation quickly went viral pushing Deja to the front of the reproductive justice movement. Consequently, she was afforded the opportunity to share her story live on CNN with Don Lemon, was dubbed "The New Face of Planned Parenthood" by the Washington Post, and lobbied elected officials on Capitol Hill. She also partnered with Planned Parenthood to run trainings, speak at events, and served as a member of the board of directors for Planned Parenthood Arizona.
Using her new found platform to create lasting change in her hometown and expanding her work beyond Planned Parenthood to community health centers, Deja helped to found the Reproductive Health Access Project in 2017 alongside untraditional youth leaders. The team included teen moms, formerly incarcerated youth, youth who had overcome substance abuse, and homeless youth like herself. These teens function as peer sex educators and run teen clinics every week in which transportation, birth control services, STI testing, and PrEP are all provided to young people at absolutely no cost to them. They’ve since been able to serve over 4,000 of their peers. That same year, she organized a walk out and march at her high school as a part of the March for our Lives movement and organized protests around child detention centers in her city.
In addition to her community work, Deja also balanced school, work, and providing for herself and her mother (fun fact: she worked at a gas station for 2 years to make ends meet). All of this hard work and dedication paid off when Deja was accepted on a full ride to Columbia University making her the first person in her family to attend college. Since moving to New York City, her work has grown and taken new directions. She joined JUV Consulting, a consulting company completely run by members of GenZ, as a Senior Partner where she worked for over a year and founded her own organization, GenZ Girl Gang which is redefining sisterhood in the age of social media. Teen Vogue selected her as a member of their 21 Under 21 class of 2018, she partnered with Cara Delevingne and Puma to highlight her story in their #DoYou campaign, was named DoSomething’s Empower Player of the year, joined the Dazed 100, received Planned Parenthood Catalyst for Change Award, and found herself growing a social media following that would later make her MAC Cosmetics’ youngest ever ambassador and a Nike Dream Leader.
The combination of these experiences eventually lead her to take the year off of school and join the Kamala Harris For The People Campaign full time. She worked as the Influencer and Surrogate Strategist out of the head quarters at just 19. This made her the youngest of her coworkers by far and one of the youngest people ever to hold a position of that level on a presidential campaign.
