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Alicia Garza Net Worth – How Much Does She Make?

Alicia Garza Net Worth Estimate

Alicia Garza net worth is estimated to be between $1 million and $5 million. There is no publicly available information as to the breakdown of her assets.

Read on to find out more about who she is, her career, early life, and many more interesting facts.

 

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So Who is Alicia Garza?

Alicia Garza is an author and civil rights activist. She’s best known for being the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, an international movement advocating for the rights of Black people.

Various issues that she’s organized people around include anti-racism, putting an end to police brutality, and violence against transgender People of Color.

She has been published in Rolling Stone, The Nation, and The Guardian. She is also the director for Special Projects as the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the Principal for Black Futures Lab.

 

Alicia Garza’s Career

 

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Garza trained in political education at the School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL, for short) in San Francisco, California’s Bay Area in 2003. This program taught young People of Color how to politically organize.

It did this by giving them positions in various community organizations in West Oakland, California.

Garza was placed in Just Cause Oakland, where she met Malachi Garza, a trans man who eventually became her romantic partner.

After finishing with SOUL, Alicia Garza joined a research campaign called People United for a Better Life in Oakland, or PUEBLO. Their goal was to research the connection between economic and community security for People of Color.

When interviewed for Vanity Fair, she told them that “Building economic opportunities in local communities is a better alternative to dealing with crime and violence than increasing police budgets.”

Her first project was helping the community resist the building of a proposed Walmart. Ultimately, the area’s work committee decided to pull their support, and Walmart opened.

After PUEBLO, Garza moved on to a year of work for the University of California Student Association. There, she promoted activism to the students of the university. She joined the organization People Organized to Win Employment Rights, or POWER, in 2005.

According to its mission statement, POWER is a “multi-racial and multi-lingual grassroots organization of African Americans and Latinas committed to winning economic, environmental, racial, and gender justice.”

While there, she became an advocate for increased funding for public housing and maintenance. She was part of a huge project to transform 250 acres, which cost $7 billion.

Part of this land had been radioactively contaminated. All of it was underserved by public transportation. She helped get free transit approved for young people, seniors, and the disabled.

She also took part in a book put out by POWER which analyzed how the livelihoods of San Francisco’s working-class People of Color were being threatened by capitalism and gentrification.

POWER allied with other groups against the developer of the gentrification project, Lennar Urban. They lost, however, due to the Democratic Party establishment opposing them.

Next, Alicia Garza joined another prominent organization, the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She created a new program specifically focused on Black domestic laborers. At this time, she also found the Black Lives Matter movement with Opal Tometi and Patrice Cullors.

Black Lives Matter began as a hashtag that grew out of a Facebook post. On July 13, 2013, Garza was so heartbroken and angry when Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman was acquitted that she made a post.

She wrote, “stop saying we are not surprised. that’s a damn shame in itself. I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter. And I will continue that. stop giving up on black life.

Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.” Cullors then shared this on her Twitter account with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.

This then grew into an organization with the same name. It was born out of anger over police brutality and murder of Black people, mass incarceration, and racial inequalities in the American legal system.

It became particularly widespread after the protests in Ferguson, Missouri after police killed another Black man, Michael Brown.

Garza was the leader of the Freedom Ride to Ferguson, which led to chapters of Black Lives Matter being built all over the world. According to her, however, it’s not something she created. She sees her work as simply continuing the work of Black people who fought for civil rights before her.

She and Black Lives Matter have been credited with popularizing the use of social media to politically mobilize large groups of people en masse. Other movements that have followed in its footsteps include #MeToo.

Garza is the host of a political podcast called Lady Don’t Take No, named for a song written by Latryx. It launched in April 2020. That same year, her first book came out.


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Titled The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart, it was published by Penguin Books. The book is a biography and guide full of lessons for people who want to be activists.

When Angelica Ross asked her in an interview why she wrote the book, she said, “I wanted people to see under the hood and under the curtains of what goes on in this work.. I’ve had the experience of feeling like I was not cut out for this work, and I wanted to humanize the movement”.

Alicia Garza today is in 27th place in Root 100’s annual list of most influential Black people in the country, right after Patrice Cullors, her colleague and Black Lives Matter co-founder. She continues to give speeches all over the United States.

She’s also been published in Rolling Stone, Huffington Post, The Guardian, The Feminist Wire, The National, and Truth Out. She also is the director of Special Projects at the National Domestic Workers Alicante.

She was also chosen as the Member’s Choice for Community Grand Marshal at the Oakland LGBTQ+ Pride parade, due to her work both with the queer community and all of society.

She marched there with more than two dozen other Black Lives Matter volunteers, alongside the previous year’s Grand Marshal, Miss Major, a prominent trans rights activist.

Awards

Like prominent black poet Amanda Gorman, Alicia Garza has received recognition from the highest levels of society.

Alicia Garza was recognized on Politico50’s 2015 guide of Thinkers, Doers, and Visionaries, alongside Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, as well as on Root 100’s List of African American Achievers between the ages of 25-45.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian awarded Garza a Local Hero award. The Harvey Milk Democratic Club awarded her the Bayard Rustin Community Activist Award twice. The Centre for Media Justice presented her with the Jeanne Gauna Communicate Justice Award.

Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi were runners-up for The Advocate’s Person of the Year Award in 2015. They were also awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in Nov 2017.

Garza was named a cohort for the Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equality in 2018, their inaugural year. The focus was in fighting racism in the United States and South Africa.

Fortune Magazine included Garza in their “40 Under 40” List in the “Government and Politics” section in 2020. That same year, Time had her on their 100 Most Influential People of 2020 List, along with BBC’s 100 Women list.

She was also listed in the 32nd position of the Queer 50 List put out by Fast Company.


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Alicia Garza: Early Life

Alicia Garza was born on January 4, 1981, in Oakland, California. Until she was 4 years old, she lived with her single mother and her mom’s twin brother in San Rafael, California.

Her African American mother then married a Jewish man whose last name was Schwartz. Alicia grew up with the name Alicia Schwartz, and she still identifies as Jewish to this day.

Garza’s stepfather ran an antique store, and later had help from Joey, her half-brother that Garza’s mother and stepfather had when she was 8 years old.

She first began to be an activist at the age of 12, when she fought to promote sex education and information about birth control. As an undergrad at the University of California, San Diego, he worked at the school’s student health center.

She also became a member of the student association, demanding higher pay for the school’s janitorial staff. In 2002, she helped organize the university’s very first Women of Color Conference. She graduated that same year with degrees in sociology and anthropology.

 

Alicia Garza’s Personal Life and Family

Alicia Garza identifies as Jewish and as queer. She met her partner Malachi Garza, a transgender man, in 2003 when she first went to interview for SOUL. Malachi was supposed to be her interviewer but showed up 40 minutes late.

When he finally showed up, she explained in 2016 at the YBCA 100 Summit, what was supposed to be “a twenty-minute interview turned into a four-hour conversation, I remember leaving there and saying, ‘I met my soulmate.’” They married in 2008, and she took the name Garza. In 2021, they divorced, after being together 17 years.

Alicia Garza was raised by her African American mother and Jewish stepfather. Her mother sadly passed away from a brain tumor in 2018. As far as we know, her father and half-brother, Joey, are still alive. She does not have any children.

Garza has a tattoo on her chest that reads:

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
And I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life.

This is a quote from Black poet June Jordan’s famous poem, “Poem about My Rights,” (written sometime before 1981) which is deeply meaningful to Garza as an activist and a Black woman.

Alicia Garza’s Social Media Influence

 

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A post shared by Alicia Garza (@chasinggarza)

Alicia Garza maintains an active presence on a number of social media platforms. This makes sense as such a key component of her activism has been centered around the use of social media as a means of uniting and organizing collective action. What else might one expect from someone who originated a global movement with the use of a single hashtag?

Twitter

On Twitter, her handle is @aliciagarza. She has over 172,000 followers and she follows 969 accounts, as of the present day. Most of her tweets tend to center around her activism, along with plugs for events she and other fellow activists are taking part in.

She also includes information about her podcast and when new episodes drop onto the various apps they’re available on.

Facebook

Alicia Garza also has a public Facebook profile. She has 65,000 followers on that platform but is herself following only 10 people over there. As with her Twitter, most of her posts center on her activism and plugs for various activism events and dates of interest.

Instagram

Garza also has a public Instagram account. Her account is called @chasinggarza, and she lists her pronouns there as she/her/hers. She has 279,000 followers on that platform and follows 866. She tends to post selfies, food photos, clips from her podcast, interviews, and more.

LinkedIn

Alicia Garza has a public LinkedIn account that lists her current role as “Principal at Black Futures Lab,” a voter mobilization and advocacy group. The company is headquartered in Oakland, California. On her profile, she lists her skills as organizational development, community organizing, movement building, supervision and support, political education, Social Movements, Community Organizing, Organizational Development, Politics, Community Outreach, and more.

TikTok

Alicia Garza does not seem to have a TikTok account at the present time. It is hard to imagine she will not eventually join the platform in some form, however, due to TikTok’s dominance among younger demographics, which historically tend to be more open to change and advocacy goals.


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Alicia Garza: Height, Weight

Alicia Garza’s height is estimated to be at about 5 feet, 7 inches (170.18 centimeters). Exact details about her height and weight are not currently publicly available. However, if the height estimate is accurate, her height appears to be average, and her weight seems to be moderate.

Alicia Garza Net Worth & Bio Summary

NameAlicia Garza
Real NameAlicia Garza
Age41
Place of BirthOakland, California USA
OccupationWriter and Activist
Net Worth Estimate$1Million - $5Million