Sabrina Hersi Issa

Sabrina Hersi Issa is a human rights technologist and civic infrastructure builder who stakes her work at the intersections of technology, democracy, and power on a bold vision: that innovation protects and elevates human dignity.

Sabrina has been building the rooms, the networks, and the institutions the field runs on. She created Rights x Tech, a forum and practitioner community that brings together technologists, movement leaders, policy experts, and activists to do the hard, cross-sectoral work of embedding human rights principles into the platforms that govern daily life. Rights x Tech has grown into one of the rare sustained spaces in the country where movement organizers and product engineers can sit in the same room and leave with shared vocabulary. She is the architect of Hacking Hunger and Hacking Relief, the hackathons that reimagined digital services and mobilized technologists in direct response to humanitarian disasters, refugee crises, and healthcare access emergencies.

She is the founder and executive director of Bold Impact, a civic institute incubating initiatives at the nexus of media, democracy, and technology. Through Bold Impact she leads Democracy Well, a national movement network and collective fund that has deployed millions to leaders building a democracy where everyone can thrive.

Her digital rights work is concrete and consequential. Sabrina leads a working group supporting abortion providers navigating AI in clinical care, helping physicians understand the surveillance risks, data vulnerabilities, and algorithmic harms embedded in tools entering their practices. She created the Movement Security Summit, providing training in digital security, operational security, and organizational care to frontline activists who are most often targeted and least often resourced.

She is the founder of Survivor Fund, a political organizing fund dedicated to building power for survivors of sexual violence. Survivor Fund operates at the intersection of civic infrastructure and digital safety: survivors are among the most acutely targeted populations online, facing doxxing, coordinated harassment, and platform-enabled abuse. Sabrina built a leadership pipeline and candidate training program specifically to resource survivors to build political power on their own terms, not just to survive it.

She is the creator of the Bold Prize, a crowdfunded leadership award that lifts up courageous Black women in technology. Past honorees include Dr. Timnit Gebru, Ifeoma Ozoma, and Aerica Shimizu Banks. Because recognition is infrastructure, not decoration.

Sabrina is a three-time Emmy award winner for her work in news and documentaries. Her writing and media work reflects a throughline that runs beneath all of it: that care, wellbeing, and community are not soft concepts but structural ones. As an opinion contributor to NBC News, The Guardian, and NPR, she has used her public platform to make the case that technology must be accountable to the communities it touches, and that a thriving democracy is one where people are safe, seen, and supported.

Sabrina has served as a Race and Technology Fellow at Stanford University's Digital Civil Society Lab and serves on the board of Mission Telecom. Her early career spanned NBC News, National Public Radio, Oxfam America, and Afghans for Civil Society. Washingtonian Magazine named her a Woman to Watch. Ebony Magazine featured her in its Power 100. She is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Sabrina is a graduate of Ohio State University where she was a triple major in International Relations & Diplomacy, Political Science and Women Studies. She speaks Somali, Arabic and Italian.