Mission
Social Justice Lab believes in the dynamism of diversity in all forms. In that light, we do not shy away from conflicting world views or knowledge horizons. Instead, challenging conversations that involve differing ideologies or worldviews are embraced and facilitated to ensure that prescribed outcomes are not the goal. We believe this approach creates the conditions for more open-ended and innovative idea sharing and problem solving.
LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
SJL believes building leadership starts with identifying leaders at the high school level. SJL aims cultivate youth that display leadership in a variety of disciplines and build a slate of progressive elected and community leaders who come from the communities they want to serve.
By adapting best practices from existing youth leadership projects, SJL will develop a continuum of development activities and services. SJL hopes to eventually provide each youth participant with a customized path toward their own chosen leadership position and equip them with the skillsets and experiential knowledge to pay it forward to younger generations.
Why SJL?
“I started Social Justice Lab because this country needs input from – and dialogue between – all walks of life, professions, trades, classes, faiths, races, and ethnicities.”
— Gita J. Stulberg
Funding Request · Book Proposal
From the Co-Founder of MyVote Project · 2026
Me
,
We
Essays on gathering, belonging, and the civic life between us
"Culture is a manifestation of what the society is experiencing. It has to be."
Trevor Noah, What Now Podcast
It is not a how-to. It is a witnessing.
Me, We is part oral history, part memoir, told in the tradition of formal invention that Viet Thanh Nguyen brought to A Man of Two Faces. It moves between two registers: the author as participant in spaces where the work isn't spreading something outward, it's holding something still; and the author inside twenty years of her own political work, weaving personal vignettes about what it has meant to try to move people, and what she keeps discovering from those who do it differently. Still showing up. Still changed.
The DJ who turns a monthly night into a chosen family. The lifestyle brand founder whose studio becomes a neighborhood's living room. The running club that accidentally built a movement. The karaoke host who creates belonging through collective vulnerability. The acupuncture clinic that doubles as a healing community. Artists, club owners, makers, surfers, restorative justice facilitators, youth activists — and the young people who organized an election cycle and didn't realize they were becoming gatherers until they already were.
Why This, Why Now
Civic trust is collapsing. Formal institutions generate obligation, not participation. And yet, in unremarkable rooms across the country, cultural organizers are doing the thing political life keeps failing to do: making people feel like part of something. This book is an oral history of that work, told in lyric and narrative essay, before it disappears unrecorded.
Its literary companion, Just Lead (working title), is a documentary series currently in development.
The Form
Me, We is a lyric hybrid oral history — personal essay meeting reported portrait, in the tradition of Viet Thanh Nguyen's A Man of Two Faces. It opens in a backyard in Los Angeles on a Tuesday night. Miles Davis, strangers, and a narrator who bought two tickets just in case. It ends with a generation of young organizers who didn't know they were becoming one until they already were.
Woven into each essay, quietly and without announcement, one small thing the reader could do before the next essay begins.
Some of the Voices: Cultural Organizers & the MyVote Generation
FreeIntentional listening sessions, LA & NY
JohnSade Night Monthly DJ night, LA
EliClub owner & DJ, NYC
DeniseAdult makers collective, LA
TerrellCultural art gallery, LA
ErwinLifestyle brand studio + café, community space
AutumnArtist, LA
NathanGlobal supper clubs
DanKaraoke nights
Nona & RobFan festival, identity as participation
HeidiFriends From NY Dance Parties
MarianneRunning club turned community, LA
Michael & YukaAcupuncture clinic as gathering space, NYC
NinaRestorative Justice Circles
CodySmall World Books, Venice
DougD Evan Surf Shop, Costa Rica
Janneken & LaurenCommittee Person & Ward Leader, arts professionals
SariParkland → March for Our Lives → MyVote → Capitol Hill
MyVote AlumniMaria, Maddie, Gracie, Anna, Naadiya, Bela, Katie, Chase, Carlie, Chloe, Juliana, Elea, Mia, Krisna, Michele — the gatherers in formation
Comparable Works
A Man of Two Faces (Viet Thanh Nguyen) · The Art of Gathering (Priya Parker) · Bowling Alone (Robert Putnam) · Emergent Strategy (adrienne maree brown) · Palaces for the People (Eric Klinenberg) · Tribe (Sebastian Junger)
Me, We shares Nguyen's lyric, fragmented, deeply personal approach to nonfiction — brought to bear on the question of how Americans gather, and what we build when we do.
The Ask
Me, We is seeking support from oral history, civic narrative, and public humanities funders whose missions align with documenting grassroots leadership and community voice. To date, 3 of an anticipated 20+ cultural organizer interviews have been conducted, alongside 13 of a planned 20+ interviews with MyVote Project student alumni. Support would fund research travel, interview production, transcription, and dedicated writing time to complete the full manuscript.
TBD
Let's talk
"We didn't just prepare them to participate in democracy. We taught them how to build rooms people want to be in."