As the leader of the New Georgia Project, the Stacey Abrams–founded civic engagement organization, and its political action arm, the New Georgia Project Action Fund, Nsé Ufot is on a mission not just to enroll new voters in her state, but to turn them into what she calls “super voters”—people who show up for each and every election. Since its founding in 2014, the NGP has helped more than 500,000 young people and people of color register to vote across the state, which tipped Georgia blue in the 2020 presidential race and delivered Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the Senate. Ufot is now working to protect these new voters from efforts to suppress them. When Georgia’s state legislators proposed a restrictive voting law earlier this year, Ufot used social media and a digital billboard campaign to call on Georgia- based businesses such as Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, and Home Depot to denounce the bill. After it passed, the NGP joined with two other groups to sue Georgia’s secretary of state for violating the 14th Amendment and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Where did your interest in civic engagement begin?
I am the only daughter of some really conservative, lower-case “c,” Christian African immigrants. I would be playing trash can basketball with my brothers and the boys from the neighborhood, and then would get yelled at by my mom to come in and make dinner for the family. Bringing my family along with my politics—because they weren’t going to change me—meant shifting their gender politics. So being a girl child in this very male-dominated religious culture gave me perspective. Then studying for my American citizenship exam gave me the vocabulary. And then I worked as a labor lawyer and union organizer, which gave me the experience, strategy, and tools that I need to do this kind of work.
You have a theory that super voters are made, not born. What does that mean for how the New Georgia Project works?
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