Arianna Genis

Arianna Genis is a xicana organizer, political campaigner, digital strategist, and storyteller. For nearly 10 years, she's dedicated her organizing to advancing racial, gender, and economic justice via campaigns, leadership development, and content creation. Each effort becomes an opportunity to captivate the political imagination of communities who've been left out and many times undermined, to claim the power they deserve in our democracy.

Arianna's first campaign successfully passed paid sick time for hourly workers in Minneapolis. As a digital organizer, she worked with a team to garner public support for the policy. She learned the responsibility and power of telling the stories of the workers who risked their jobs by openly advocating for the policy, particularly women and people of color who are overrepresented in low-wage jobs. After the win, Arianna went on to organize a coalition of state-wide leaders from many organizations to apply a race, class and gender framework to their campaigns, a win that shifted communications strategies across Minnesota to this day.

In 2017, Arianna managed her first candidate campaign, unseating an incumbent who voted against paid sick time by building a team of neighborhood leaders and young organizers of color while collaborating with a larger effort to win a progressive majority in the Minneapolis City Council. Shortly after, she helped lead another progressive candidate campaign and helped elect one of the first women of color as County Commissioner.

After years of state level work, Arianna was recruited to co-lead the national organizational rebrand of Wellstone Action to become re:power, transforming a political organizing and training group's identity to explicitly center a multiracial view of justice and to shift its audience focus to the New American Majority. She also branded the term "inclusive politics" a framework that asks for practice of uncovering and highlighting the historic contributions of people of color, women, and working class people to our political fabric.

In 2020, she dedicated her time to building the political power of the Latinxs with Mijente, leading efforts in the battleground state of North Carolina as part of Fuera Trump, a successful nationwide campaign dedicated to mobilizing the Latinx vote against Trump. As the NC State Director, Arianna built a statewide team in a region where the number of Latinxs involved in electoral politics is minimal. Working alongside a deportation defence organization, Arianna led a team of 50 organizers who were of mixed immigration status - many undocumented - and ranged from college students fluent in English and Spanish to older mothers who were monolingual Spanish speakers. Every organizer was determined to do whatever it took to protect their community. When the pandemic hit, it was the team who demanded Mijente continue the canvassing efforts. Guided by a shared commitment, Arianna launched an innovative canvassing model that prioritized the safety of people and developed it into the largest Latinx voter mobilization campaign in the state. After the presidential election, Arianna joined the Georgia runoff election to help win back the Senate, and made history with Mijente's campaign by reaching every Latinx voter.

As a co-founder of Latina Theory (LT), a podcast she co-hosted for three years, she brought discussions of reproductive rights, immigration, elections to the forefront for Latinas, while getting into the latest pop culture. From this experience, she learned of her love for creating content that uses culture and popular education principles. She never forget the countless emails LT received from listeners thanking them for talking about abortion openly or for explaining city elections in a fun way.

Currently, Arianna is working for Mijente. In the near future, she plans to launch her own media platform that combines organizing and politics with content creation and narrative strategy.