DEJA’S story

Deja Foxx is a 23 year old activist, strategist, and influencer from Tucson, Arizona. She was raised by a single mother and due to issues of substance abuse experienced hidden 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 Seeing how her school's outdated sex education system disadvantaged her and students like her she fought for comprehensive sex education reform and embarked on the organizing campaign that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 an effort to protect Title X funding (which she and millions of other low-income people used to access birth control with no-copay), she confronted her senator at a town hall. The exchange was captured in a video that nearly overnight would garner upwards of 17 million views, pushing Deja to the forefront of the reproductive justice movement. In the coming weeks she shared 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. 

Using her new found platform to create lasting change in her hometown, Deja co-founded the El Rio Reproductive Health Access Project in 2017 alongside untraditional youth leaders. The team included teen moms, formerly incarcerated youth, youth who overcame substance abuse, and homeless youth like herself. These teens became peer sex educators and run free 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 served over 17,000 young people. 

 In addition to her advocacy, 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, graduating in the class of 2023 from the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race.

In her freshman year of college, she founded GenZ Girl Gang. This community of young womxn and fems redefining sisterhood in the age of social media was inspired by her own experience building bonds online after moving to NYC. The team has grown to include leaders across the country spanning high school to post-grad and over 15,000 community members. Together they work to advance collaboration culture, build power in personal networks, and create strategies that push the way we use social media as a community building tool.

She took her sophomore year off of school to join the Kamala Harris For The People Campaign full time. At just 19, she worked as the Influencer and Surrogate Strategist on the digital team out of the head quarters exploring how to mobilize content creators and community builders online. She was the youngest member of her team, the youngest across any of the 2020 presidential campaigns at her level of leadership, and one of the youngest in history. In her time on the campaign she lead lead the #ThisIsWhatAPresidentLooksLike campaign about the power of representation. 

After the campaign, she signed to Ford Models as a digital creator and went on to to build digital strategies for PACs and nonprofits all while pursuing her undergraduate degree in Media Studies from Columbia University. Deja currently lives in New York City where she focuses on creating communitiy, content, and change through her multifaceted work.

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