Rashad Robinson Keynote Speaker

For more than two decades, Rashad Robinson’s strategic campaigns, media expertise and movement leadership have played a critical role in winning real change for real people.

Today, he advises and collaborates with foundations, nonprofits and leaders across media, politics, government and business. His aim: to increase their impact by designing effective campaigns, developing innovative media and organizing strategies, guiding strategic investments, and helping them unlock the power of communities to bring about progress.

Rashad’s new book, From Presence to Power: How to Take On the Fights That Matter—and Win, is published by One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House. It has been praised as “a master class in real activism” and “a must-read for anyone who wants to achieve lasting structural change, not just momentary victories and fleeting results.” The book offers something rare in today’s political moment: a clear, strategic roadmap for understanding how power actually works—and how to build and use it for the collective good. It answers the questions on so many people’s minds today: Why are we losing so much? In order to win the big changes we want to see, what do we need to change about the ways we fight back?

Rashad’s work and insights are regularly featured across broadcast, print and social media, including CNN, MSNBC, BET, NPR, NewsOne, OWN, The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, Essence, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Guardian. He has also been profiled by Fast Company, Ebony, The Root, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Rashad has driven campaigns to shift portrayals in media, win public policy fights, hold corporations accountable by forcing them to change their practices, and build political power in communities that have long been excluded from it. Among those achievements, in 2020, Rashad co-led the largest advertising boycott in history: a 1,000-company boycott of Facebook and Instagram. Starting in 2015, Rashad was instrumental in launching the movement to redefine the role and work of local prosecutors, leading to dozens of subsequent reforms that measurably reduced mass incarceration and many other injustices that have been foundational to the system. In the 2000s, before marriage equality was recognized nationally, he led efforts to secure same-sex wedding announcements in more than one hundred newspapers. Other notable victories include winning bail reform, decarceration, net neutrality, anti-discrimination practices across the tech landscape, inclusive representations across the media landscape, and the elimination of predatory Big Bank fees.

Rashad also served as co-chair of the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder. He won a Webby Award for Best Political Podcast in 2020 and has received numerous honors from organizations across the social change sector. Under his leadership, Color Of Change was featured multiple times on Fast Company’s List of Most Innovative Companies. He has also received honorary doctorates from Georgetown University and St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

Rashad was a member of the inaugural cohort of Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity, a program bringing together leaders in racial justice work across the globe. He also regularly participates in international meetings focused on facing the global backlash to hard-won achievements related to LGBT rights.

For nearly 14 years, Rashad led Color Of Change, transforming it into a national force for Black political power. Prior to that, he led advocacy at GLAAD during a period of major cultural and political progress for LGBT people. Across his work, he focuses on helping institutions understand the moment they are in—and how to engage in the type of strategic action that leads to real outcomes.