The Rosenberg Foundation selected eight movement leaders in California for the newest formation of Leading Edge fellows for the next three years. The Leading Edge Fund seeds, incubates, and accelerates bold ideas from the next generation of movement leaders.

“As California’s communities and values face multiple threats from a new national political reality, these bold leaders and their powerful visions for freedom, justice, and liberation give us hope and inspiration,” said Tim Silard, President of the Rosenberg Foundation. “The Leading Edge Fellows are tackling deep racial, economic, and social barriers to survival and opportunity for communities across California, and we are proud to support their innovative and visionary work.”

With support from the Leading Edge Fund, the fellows will advance workers’ rights, replace incarceration and criminalization with community-based care, reduce reliance on immigration detention facilities, build narrative power for movements, advance power-building for transgender people, and more.

Learn more about the 2025 – 2027 formation of Leading Edge Fund Fellows:

• Lizbeth Abeln (She/Her) will support residents, workers and community leaders in the Inland Region to shift the city of Adelanto away from reliance on detention facilities towards economic and political autonomy and power.
  
  
• Jennifer Alejo / “Alejo” (She/Her) is supporting exploited and excluded workers across California to establish worker centers. These centers advocate for tangible improvements in working conditions through transformative, inclusive, worker-led initiatives.
  
  
• James King (He/Him) is building an Emergent Strategy Lab to end mass incarceration, bringing together current and formerly incarcerated scholars and advocates to develop policies that dismantle and replace the retributive model of incarceration.
  
  
• Jean Melesaine Leasiolagi (She/Her/They/Them) is creating a Narrative Change Incubator that provides infrastructure for multimedia storytellers to connect with local groups and organizations to strengthen movement infrastructure through narrative change.
  
  
• Sarait Martinez (She/Her/Ella), as part of her work with Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño (CBDIO), is developing the first Agricultural Worker Center for Indigenous farmworkers in the state. The Center will be an organizing hub where workers pursue language justice and pass worker and family-friendly policies at local and state levels.
  
  
• Priscilla A. Ocen (She/Her) is establishing The Center for Community Alternatives to Policing to foster an ideological, political, and research ecosystem that champions non-carceral, community-based care as an alternative to policing and prisons.
  
  
• Yuan Wang (She/They) is helping to create new statewide infrastructure to steward and connect grassroots transgender power-building projects across California.
  
  
• James Woodson (He/Him) is launching The Poetic Justice Initiative, which will build Black narrative power in California by creating sustainable infrastructure for Black communities to tell their own stories; promote racial healing; and uplift Black strength, pride, and resilience.

The Leading Edge Fund supports emerging movement leaders by providing unrestricted funding and leadership development so that they can pursue the bold visions for change that lasting transformation demands. Fellows receive $270,000 in general support over three years. They also participate in individualized technical assistance around program development, fundraising, strategic communications, and executive coaching. Through regular trainings and group retreats, Leading Edge strives to enhance each fellows’ capacity to achieve their vision while also building a collective, powerful and mutually supportive community of change agents throughout the state.

Since its launch in 2016, the Leading Edge Fund has invested more than $10 million in 26 fellows pursuing their vision for change. Founded by the Rosenberg Foundation in partnership with the Hellman Foundation, the fund is also supported by the Meadow Fund, The California Wellness Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation and the San Francisco Foundation.