Passion Profile: Deja Foxx
Written by Katelin Ling Cooper
Photo by Nolwen Cifuentes/@dejafoxx
Passion Profile, a monthly interview series for the Politics & Activism section, spotlights the community work of grassroots organizers who discuss how the intersectionality of their identity influences their political education and engagement with the world.
Parachute has partnered with Instagram to amplify and share interviews with amazing young organizers discussing their work. In this profile, we are featuring Deja Foxx, founder of GenZ Girl Gang, who utilizes social media as a tool for community building and resource-sharing.
Sitting in the library at Columbia University, where she attends as a junior studying race & ethnicity, Deja Foxx finds time in between class and studying to share her story and passion for mobilizing her community.
Recently, you have been in the lime-light, you went a little viral on social media and that was cool to witness. How was that for you, being on that side of feeling like “I’m just a normal human, but suddenly everyone knows who I am”?
Deja: I had a great start. I got my start in grassroots organizing around sex education in my school district. It was really in that space of school board meetings, where there were maybe 10 people in the audience, five elected small-town politicians where I got to cultivate my story and my sense of the ways my story could be used to create change. It is there that I got to practice, where I got to push the limits of what was uncomfortable but not unsafe for me to share.
So when I was 15, learning the power of my story through the lens of sex education reform at a school board level prepared me for when I was then 16 years old, and I started using my story around birth control access to push for expanded funding and planned parenthood. So in some sense I was already prepared, I had been doing this, I had the support of organizers and training around media and storytelling already in my back pocket.
But there is also no way to know or prepare for virality. An interesting part of this story that connects to the second point I want to make is that I didn’t even record that moment. Someone else recorded it and it was shared, and I woke up the next morning and nearly 18 million people had seen me confront my senator about birth control access and ask why he as a white man would deny me access and point out his privilege. So that was, obviously, unsettling. It would be scary for anybody to wake up the next day and have millions of people from all over the world have access to you and your story. But I’ll also add, as someone who has now leaned into content creation as a means of change-making, I recognize the responsibility that comes with that, but I also give myself some credit that I didn’t pick these viral moments, they kind of found me. And in the same way, building a following, I wasn’t really super intentional about it, it wasn’t something I had an aim to do, it was something that kind of just happened. But I think now I’ve learned to embrace that role, and embrace the role that digital and content creation play in our larger movement.
“My life has always been political”
I love how you start off by sharing how we use storytelling as a way to cultivate change. Can you expand more on how your cultural background or upbringing has impacted your organizing?
Deja: I was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona. I am a first-generation American. I was raised by a single mom in a household that both fell underneath the poverty lines and relied heavily on government programs like food stamps and section eight housing. So that vision that people who were elected were always making decisions about my access to the things I needed to survive has always been at the top of my mind for me. It wasn’t something I had to learn, I didn’t have to go to school to figure this out. It is my reality. So when I started fighting for birth control access, this was just one other way that my elected officials were involved in my access to the resources I needed to get by. In that sense, my life has always been political. I’ve never found politics or found an interest in it; it was about me, my survival and what I needed to get by. In that way my story has always been a key piece to my change-making because it is inseparable, the life that I live has informed the work that I do.
You have founded GenZ Girl Gang which, similar to Parachute, fills this niche need for strong community that supports us, celebrates our joys and victories and also holds space for us when we are experiencing grief. What does community mean to you?
Deja: Rooting us in my story, not only did I experience a lot of economic insecurity growing up, I also experienced housing insecurity. I left my mom’s home at just 15 years old and experienced what 1 in 30 teens in the U.S. do, and that’s hidden homelessness. That [could] mean bouncing between friends’ houses, not really having a home of your own. I lived with my partner at the time and his family, so you can see there’s an obvious tie-in between my advocacy work around sex education and birth control access, but I think a less obvious tie-in is to community. At that moment, I was a 15-year-old who was all on their own, experiencing a lot of changes not only in my housing but also in my perception of myself. I remember that sophomore year, I didn’t get re-elected to student council, I didn’t make the volleyball team, I remember the coach telling me it was because I had “a bad attitude,” and it was a pivotal moment for me. It was one where I stopped seeing myself as a leader because the people around me were telling me I was not, particularly the people at my primarily white and middle-class high school, because I didn’t fit their definition anymore.
It was in that moment that an organizer from Planned Parenthood found me. She saw my potential, and she pushed me to see it, too. She taught me the value of community and meeting people where they’re at. I remember telling her, “I can't make it to this training because my family doesn't have a car,” and she just said, “No problem, I’ll give you a ride.” It’s that idea of going a little above and beyond to meet people, particularly young people, where they’re at, to bring them into this movement, to help them see themselves as leaders that make lasting impacts; this builds a movement. It was women and organizers like her that taught me the value of community. It was also the family that took me in and taught me what it means to be in community, to be able to be vulnerable and say you need help and know that your community will be there to catch you.
That has absolutely translated into my work at GenZ Girl Gang. This was something that was born out of my freshman year dorm when I moved from Tucson, Arizona to New York City. I was the first in my family to go to college, at an ivy-league school on a full-ride, and I looked around and realized the people here were not my community, they didn’t share my experiences in large part. The definition I had always had of community as people who lived around me didn’t fit anymore. Instead, I was connecting with young women and girls and femmes online who shared a lot more of my experiences — they became my community. And that’s what GenZ Girl Gang was born out of, the idea that social media can be used as a community-building tool and that there is so much power in our personal networks.
“When you invest in people, you never really lose”
Coming out of the GenZ Girl Gang Back-to-School Summitt, as you reflect on your academic experience in predominantly white institutions, what communities have you encountered that have shaped you who you are today?
Deja: One of the things I realized when I got to college was how far behind I really was and I don’t mean academically, I don’t even mean personally, but professionally. I saw people mobilizing their connections to get ahead. I saw people who could tap their dad for an internship, or a family friend for their summer job. I realized that wasn’t something that I had, I came from a family that had none of that.
I looked at social media and saw it as a real tool for social mobility for me and so many other young women. GenZ Girl Gang is not only about building this community where we can be vulnerable and catch each other, but it’s really about a well-rounded version of success, promoting each other’s well-being while also promoting success in a traditional sense: when we collaborate with one another, we can get further ahead instead of competing. As young women, we are able to redefine success and invert what has always been primarily older white rich men whose success is predicated on pushing people down, our success isn’t gonna look like that, it has to be built on pulling each other up. GenZ Girl Gang and the invention of this community is tied to one another, that when I do better, you do better.
It is about redefining sisterhood, using social media as the tool to do it, putting young women, girls, femmes at the forefront, preparing them to be leaders who have strong communities in their corner and the power in their personal networks to get there, because we should be. We are facing some of the most pressing issues such as the rise of hate and nationalism, or climate change, things that if we don’t address now, we may never be able to. These things are affecting us because we are inheriting this future.
So at its core, a community I encountered was people who had a lot of connections and were mobilizing them to become those leaders. That led to me thinking, there is a way we can build this for ourselves, and trying to do that in an online community.
How do you redefine success?
Deja: I’ve always defined success through the lens of organizing–[recognizing] I'm going to lose some elections, I’m probably going to lose campaigns, there are times where the vote doesn’t go my way or that funding or grant doesn’t come through. That is the reality of this work. The thing that keeps me going that I hope to share with other movement leaders, particularly young people who have a long, long fight ahead of them, is that when you invest in people, you never really lose. If you measure your success by the binary metrics — did we get the vote or didn’t we — you’re going to drive yourself crazy and you are gonna burn out.
Instead, shifting our focus to: did I empower the people around me to become leaders in their own right? Did I help people learn how to share their stories? Did I help them build new skills? That’s movement building. That’s sustainable. That’s how I define success, as the people around me.
When you experience burnout, how do you deal with that?
Deja: I’m not particularly good at this *laughs* I feel I may have girl-bossed a little too close to the sun sometimes. I think the thing that keeps me going is the same thing that defines success: community. I have built a community around myself of young women and femmes that I know I can trust, not just in the sense that I can tell them my secrets, but that I know when I need to take a step back, they have the skills to go forward without me for now. I can trust that when I say I need a break, someone will be there to pick up for me. As we talk about what it means to redefine success and to redefine sisterhood, we have to think about the idea of the relay race, that none of us are in a marathon or sprint here. One of my friends Brea Baker once said on a panel, “This work isn’t a marathon or a sprint, it’s a relay race,” and I see it that way, too. So when I’m feeling burnt out I remind myself that if I need to step away, the world is going to keep spinning, and that I have surrounded myself with a community of people who I can trust to pick up that work who are empowered, who are capable. The world is going to keep on spinning when I gotta take a break!
I recently was on a panel with Loretta Ross who is one of the creators of the reproductive justice framework and one of the cofounders of SisterSong. The advice she gave me about burnout was that we are all in the chain of freedom, we just need to be the strongest link we can be, but that we are not the entire chain. If we’re feeling overwhelmed, if we’re feeling that it’s all too much, that it’s all on our shoulders, that’s because we’ve forgotten our interconnectedness. Not only with our community, but in the greater scope of time: there are people who have come before us and there are people who will come before us and people who will come after us and it is our job just to do the best we can right now, because that’s all we have.
In what ways can we build collective solidarity and mobilization?
Deja: My best piece of advice is that everyone has something to offer. What I have to offer may not be what you have to offer and that’s okay, that’s what makes us strong, a diverse set of skills and perspectives. So two key takeaways for people who are interested in getting involved is first and foremost that your experience is your expertise. No one in this world can tell your story the way you do and that’s your superpower, own it. Second, you don’t have to do something big. You don’t have to found a nonprofit, or go out there and tackle an issue all by yourself, you don’t even need a viral moment. In fact, my best advice on getting started is just to get personal, to think about what issues are personally impacting you.
For me, that was sex education when I was 15 years old living with my partner and his family because of issues of housing insecurity, and thinking the sex ed at my school fucking sucks and I need something better to achieve what I want in my life. So I saw a personal opportunity there. I used my personal story, I went to school board meetings and I told it until things changed. And I got my friends, my personal network, to do the same. So if it feels overwhelming and you don’t know where to start, get personal, think about what issues are personally impacting you, how you can use your personal story and who is in your personal network that will show up for you.
