Amanda Nguyen’s Career Highlights

Amanda Nguyen is a social entrepreneur, civil rights activist, and the CEO of Rise, a nongovernmental, nonprofit organization advocating for the rights of sexual violence survivors. Amanda founded Rise after her own experience with sexual assault, and she penned the comprehensive Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights. President Obama signed the bill into law in 2016, which received historic, bipartisan support in Congress.

Amanda has won numerous awards and accolades throughout her career. She is a Heinz Laureate, a Nelson Mandela Changemaker, and Marie Claire named her Young Woman of the Year in 2016. She has also landed on many prestigious lists, including Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list, the Foreign Policy 100, TIME’s 100 Next, and the Frederick Douglass 100. She went viral in February 2021 when she called on the media to more robustly cover the recent increase in Asian American hate; her voice helped increase momentum in the Stop Asian Hate movement.

Amanda has a proven track record of amplifying and accelerating grassroots social movements to effect change on the legislative level. Here are just a few career highlights of the founder of Rise:

1. 1. Rise: In 2013, while a student at Massachusetts’s Harvard University, Amanda was the victim of sexual violence. She found herself navigating a convoluted criminal justice system in Massachusetts that required her to sign paperwork every six months to prevent the authorities from destroying her sexual assault forensic exam (despite the statute of limitations for prosecuting sexual violence in Massachusetts being fifteen years). Amanda began to organize in hopes of improving the legislation. In 2014, she founded Rise, a nonprofit organization fighting for the rights of sexual violence survivors. She recruited public servants to comb through state laws that supported survivors and wrote the comprehensive Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights. The Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights ensures survivors have the right to a sexual assault forensic kit collected at no cost, have that kit preserved for twenty years, and receive notification sixty days before the kit ends up destroyed.
2. 2. Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights Passage: For years, Amanda lobbied, organized, and raised money via a crowdfunding campaign in an attempt to pass the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights into law. It wasn’t until 2015, with the help of New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen, that she was able to get the bill to the chambers of Congress. The bill passed unanimously in the Senate and the House of Representatives. President Barack Obama signed the bill into law in 2016. Among countless other accolades, Amanda received a nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for her tenacious work with the Survivor Bill of Rights.
3. 3. Governmental Work: While in college, Amanda served as an intern at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), where she trained to be an astronaut. Following her work with Rise, she worked as a deputy White House liaison for President Barack Obama’s state department, where she was the youngest member of the staff.
4. 4. 2021 Viral Video: After a surge of anti-Asian hate crimes and violence in 2021, Amanda released a video on her Instagram account highlighting multiple instances of violence directed against Asian Americans in the US. Amanda named the acts of violence perpetrated against these victims and urged her followers to tag journalists at major press outlets. The short video went viral and spread awareness of growing xenophobia against the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community on social media. Rise expanded to include education on AAPI history and solidarity.

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