Digital Team
Digital Organizing Director
Ría Thompson-Washington is an anti-racist activist, organizer, and Black Queer feminist living in the metro Washington, DC area. For more than twenty years, Ría has been organizing, strategizing, and training Black and Latinx people around the country. She has spent her career working for various campaigns in many different capacities from the labor movement to Occupy Wall Street to the Movement for Black Lives—as a trainer, facilitator, fundraiser, activist, artist, and organizer, to name a few. In her leadership role at the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), Ría currently serves on the Mass Defense Steering Committee, as senior co-chair of The United People of Color Caucus, on the Executive Council of the national organization, and Legal Worker of the Year (2021-22). Ría serves as a Legal Observer coordinator and trainer in the Washington, DC Chapter, where she is a member locally. NLG is where she learned to pair teaching mass defense strategy with the corresponding legal remedies to support protesters and activists who are in or have taken to the streets to redress their grievances with their government. At the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights as a Senior National Organizer in their Voting Rights Project, Ría trained poll monitors, organized election support for communities of color, and built Election Protection programs for civic engagement organizations across the South. In 2020 at the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), Ría created the Voter Guardian program after listening to communities describe their concerns about voting in a pandemic under a hostile federal government and trained over 4,000 people in election safety. In 2022, Ría is expanding her organizing portfolio from elections, labor, and community organizing to include digital organizing and housing justice.