Rise Inc.

About

Max Lubin created Rise in 2017, when Lubin was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. Lubin and his peers formed informal focus groups made up of high school students and found that students “don’t have the same type of advocates working on their behalf as other groups do.” ¹ As a result, Lubin created Rise as a student-led advocacy group focusing on student-specific issues. ² The organization trains community college and university students to organize various campaigns focused on eliminating tuition for higher education, ending student homelessness, and increasing financial aid. ³

Programs

Rise trains students to advocate and lobby for legislative policies that benefit students. Rise claims that its student-led advocacy campaigns helped achieve varying amounts of taxpayer-provided community college in California and Michigan, in addition to stopping tuition hikes and securing new funding for students in California. ⁴

Rise also created the Student Navigator Network in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a program aiming to connect students to public resources and emergency aid if their housing or meals are impacted by COVID-19. ⁵

Rise works with young voters to “get out the vote” and the organization claims to have “mobilized more than 100,000+ college students and young voters in key battleground districts and states including in California, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin” in 2020. ⁶ Rise also created a platform called Rise.Vote in partnership with BallotReady, an online election-education resource, for students to use to register to vote and learn about candidates. ⁶

Rise also runs the Everyday Activist program in partnership with BallotReady and Black Youth Vote!. Everyday Activist claims to be a nonpartisan coalition ⁷ designed to train and provide technology to youth that want to be activists or lead civic engagement and electoral programs. ⁸ Organizations participating in Everyday Activist must join an organizing effort training and try to help at least 50 young voters create a plan to vote. ⁷

Funding

Rise’s tax filings for 2019 show just over $300,000 in revenue and a total of about $171,000 in expenses. The prior year, the organization reported revenue just shy of $260,000 and reported about $256,000 in expenses. ⁹

In 2019, Rise won the center-left Goldhirsh Foundation’s annual “My LA2050 Grants Challenge” and received a $100,000 award to implement a proposal focused on housing and food programs for homeless students. ¹⁰ In 2022, Rise’s Everyday Activist program was a finalist in the Stronger Democracy Awards, ¹¹ a $22 million grant competition for organizations advancing various reforms in civic engagement, elections, and policymaking. ¹²

Leadership

Max Lubin is the CEO of Rise, an organization he founded in 2017. Lubin’s experience includes being an appointee in the U.S. Department of Education in the Obama administration where he worked on allocating more than $1 billion in annual investments to schools and nonprofit organizations. Lubin also worked on various state and national advocacy campaigns focused on equity. ¹³

Rise leadership also consists of over 35 student organizing fellows. ¹⁴