Nsé Ufot

How do you face down voter suppression, threats of white-supremacist violence at the polls and massive disinformation campaigns—during a pandemic—to ensure an unprecedented number of voters show up for the most important elections of our lifetime, twice? Ask Nsé Ufot. Born in Nigeria, raised in Southwest Atlanta, Nsé is a child of the South and a true believer in the voters of Georgia.

Under Nsé’s kind, creative and determined leadership, the New Georgia Project—a civic-engagement nonprofit founded in 2013 by Stacey Abrams—has worked alongside fellow grassroots organizations in the state to register hundreds of thousands of Georgians to vote. She helped ensure that Georgia’s diverse communities had what they needed to vote and vote safely in both the 2020 presidential election and the 2021 Georgia Senate runoffs—all while leveraging technology and gaming culture to engage young voters and doing the irreplaceable, hard work of reaching voters behind every door, in every corner of the state. In doing so, she has helped breathe new life into our democracy, showing us that it is both possible and up to us to create.

Poo is the executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance