Uprise brings strategic consulting to the people on the front lines of social justice and human rights.
We're consultants to you, the good guys (of all genders): activists, advocates, and funders leading movements for human rights and social justice. Uprise partners only with nonprofits and foundations that share our commitment to progressive social change. We believe you deserve the highest quality guidance, support, and training so that you can tell your stories and make change.
Here's how we do it:
We write creative, elegant, persuasive messages that shape the issues and define your identity.
We use media relations strategies that get your messages in front of the people who need to hear them.
We help you become the best spokespeople for your issues with training and coaching support.
We listen, assess, and guide organizations and teams around their diversity, equity and inclusion work.
We advise funders large and small on where and how to make strongest investments for change.
We design and run campaigns that win big.
We create beautiful speeches and presentations that get people talking.
Our secret ingredient: we're social justice and human rights activists too, with decades of experience in the trenches and in front of the camera. Our expertise includes reproductive justice; economic inequality; fair lending; democracy (voting rights, money in politics, the courts); the U.S. Jewish community; and Israeli and Palestinian organizations. We bring in-depth knowledge of the issues together with top-notch professional skills and a creative, collaborative approach.
Ready to Uprise? Get in touch: hello@upriseforgood.com
Phone
202.500.6362
Drop us a line
hello@upriseforgood.com
Team Uprise
Sharon Goldtzvik
Founder + CEO
Ginna Green
Partner + Chief Strategy Officer
Sharon Rose Goldtzvik
Founder + CEO
Sharon Rose Goldtzvik is a communications strategist and messaging expert. She’s who activists, advocates, and funders call when they need to tell their stories and make change, and who reporters call when they need expert sources and top progressive voices. Sharon helps researchers put their work into the real world, and helps campaigners make the best use of cognitive science, social psychology, and narrative research. She has served as a spokesperson and consultant on feminist issues, foreign policy, human rights, antisemitism, social and economic justice, and international development for nonprofits in the US and internationally for over a decade.
Sharon specializes in tough fights and scores big wins for her clients. She trains visionary leaders to be persuasive and inspiring spokespeople, writes research-informed messaging that shapes debates and wins issues, and creates game-changing campaigns in oppositional environments. Known for her expert guidance in times of crisis, Sharon helps clients navigate risky moments and build trust.
Sharon founded Uprise in 2015. Since then, it has become the go-to communications practice for progressive Israel and Palestine funders including the New Israel Fund, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Open Society Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation, and Foundation for Middle East Peace. Sharon has introduced American audiences to some of the most exciting and inspiring leaders and advocates from the region, including artists, political leaders, and leading human rights defenders like Yesh Din, Breaking the Silence, Standing Together, B’Tselem USA, Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, and more.
A messaging expert and narrative strategist, Sharon uses insights from message testing research, cognitive science, and social psychology to create messages that persuade and build power. She worked with ASO Communications, Faith in Minnesota and Education Minnesota to co-create and co-lead the award-winning Greater Than Fear campaign, the first ever campaign based on the Race-Class Narrative research project. With Bend the Arc and the Collaborative for Jewish Organizing, Sharon led a narrative research process and created new messaging on antisemitism that helps audiences overcome fear, join together, and take action.
Uprise creates strategies that lift up voices and stories of those doing the deepest -- and often hardest -- work for social justice across issues. Sharon partnered with Olympian Billy Mills and Running Strong for American Indian Youth to help Native young people overcome a poverty so deep it robs them of their dreams. She works with activist filmmakers who tell human stories about important, complex issues, like Advocate, from director Rachel Leah Jones, about the legendary Israeli human rights lawyer Lea Tsemel; and director Maisie Crow's Jackson, which tells the story of the last abortion clinic in Mississippi.
Before founding Uprise, Sharon worked with progressive nonprofit clients at Spitfire Strategies and Fenton Communications. She helped Nobel prize-winning economists change the narrative on income inequality and Ecuadorians victimized by US oil drilling in the Amazon; wrote TED and Ignite talks for the advocates at the forefront of free speech and internet privacy; led campaign planning for advocates working to end human trafficking; and coached campaigners for paid sick days.
Previously, Sharon directed advocacy and communications at HaMoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual, a Jerusalem-based human rights organization providing legal aid to Palestinian victims of human rights abuses.
She is a proud alum of Hampshire College, where she studied political science, Middle East policy, and theatre. She lives in Cambridge, UK with her spouse and one friendly pup.
Ginna Green
Partner + Chief Strategy Officer
Ginna Green is a strategist, writer, and movement-builder with two decades of experience telling compelling stories, shaping winning campaigns, and leading diverse teams. She joined Uprise as Partner and Chief Strategy Officer in December 2020 after two years as Chief Strategy Officer at Bend the Arc: Jewish Action. At Uprise, Ginna leads the practice on diversity + equity + inclusion and philanthropic advising within the Jewish community. She is also a principal strategist for communications, messaging, campaigns and coaching for Uprise’s progressive movement clients.
While at Bend the Arc, Ginna led the organization’s communications, advocacy, electoral + PAC, rapid response and racial equity teams. She coordinated strategic campaigns, served as a key spokesperson, and cultivated relationships across the faith and progressive movements. Ginna also co-chaired the Racial Equity Team, developed the organization’s first racial equity screen, created first-ever affinity space for people of color on staff, and conducted a longitudinal review of the organization's racial equity journey to inform future work.
Prior to Bend the Arc, Ginna was Managing Director of the Democracy Program at ReThink Media. At ReThink she strengthened the communications capacity of groups focused on money in politics, fair and diverse courts, and voting rights through robust training, messaging research and guidance, and strategic communications. Before joining ReThink, Ginna led communications at the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) for several years--including during the Great Recession and foreclosure crisis--and helped to pass the California Homeowner Bill of Rights and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. While at CRL Ginna also co-authored the groundbreaking report, Dreams Deferred: Impacts and Characteristics of the California Foreclosure Crisis. She has also been on staff at Full Court Press Communications, The OpEd Project, SPIN Academy, AlterNet and the South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center.
Ginna is a frequent speaker and writer on democracy, race, racism in the Jewish community, and Jewish community diversity, and has been published in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Salon; heard on NPR, KCRW, KQED, and CNN; and seen on local, national and international television and film. A 2020-2021 Fellow at the Kogod Research Center of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, Ginna also sits on the boards of Women's March, Political Research Associates, the Jews of Color Initiative and Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice where she serves as Secretary and the co-chair of the Racial Equity Task Force. She is an alum of the Wexner Heritage, Jeremiah Fellowship, and Selah Leadership Programs, and is also a Schusterman Senior Fellow. A native southerner, Ginna is a better-than-decent cook, a bourbon aficionado, and the mother of four amazing kids.
Contact
Ready to Uprise? Get in touch:
hello@upriseforgood.com
@upriseforgood