Shaunna Thomas has spent more than a decade at the forefront of many of the biggest cultural and political fights over sexual and gender-based violence. Now the co-founder and executive director of the gender justice organization UltraViolet is stepping aside to make way for the next generation of leaders and innovation in gender justice organizing.

“It was really becoming clear to me that how we were thinking about organizing women and advancing gender justice needs to evolve,” she said. “We’re in a dangerous moment. We’re in a period of backlash. There will ultimately be backlash to the backlash, and it’s our job to swing the pendulum back. And I think that takes a really high degree of innovation and new ways of thinking.”

Thomas is now undertaking a leadership transition in the aftermath of a presidential election defined by stark gender divides and a backlash to the movement she helped spearhead. Arisha Hatch, who has most recently been vice president and chief of campaigns at Color of Change, will take over as UltraViolet’s interim executive director, supporting innovation in gender justice organizing.

Thomas and her co-founder, Nita Chaudhary, launched UltraViolet in 2011 to adapt the gender justice movement to a new landscape dominated by social media and a fast-moving news cycle and to bring forth a cultural shift toward naming and exposing sexual violence.

“The context when we launched was so different from today,” Thomas said. “No one was organizing women online as women across a range of issues that impact women directly.”

Thomas came to progressive activism from a privileged upbringing in a conservative family in Los Angeles. She, like many young activists in the 2000s, had a political awakening spurred by the Iraq War. But she didn’t become a feminist activist until she was working as a professional political operative in her 20s.

“I wasn’t raised a feminist. And it really took entering the workplace and specifically working with congressmen, frankly, to discover that sexism was not over,” said Thomas, who has written about being harassed by a member of Congress who she was lobbying.

Read the full article about innovation in gender justice organizing by Grace Panetta at The 19th.