BUILDING A FUTURE ON REPAIR.

Before there was a League, there was a lineage.

Hannah Naomi Jones was born in Inglewood and raised across Southern California, in the Black Los Angeles tradition of faith, culture, organizing, and survival. She came of age in the afterlife of policies that reshaped Black America in real time: the war on drugs, mass incarceration, gun violence, medical neglect, poverty, and the long disinvestment of Black and working-class neighborhoods.

She was also raised inside a different kind of power. Her parents, Pastor Arturo Spates and Minister Patricia Spates, were minister-organizers before she had language for organizing. In their house, faith had hands. Their home became a food pantry and a safe haven; their weekends, a ministry of feeding people downtown. Their work reached neighbors, immigrants, people navigating addiction, young people caught in violence, and families standing at the edge of systems that had already failed them. They didn't wait for permission to serve, or need a title to intervene. They stood in the gap, between hunger and dignity, violence and safety, despair and possibility.

Her roots run through the Great Migration. Her mother was born in 1954 in the Jim Crow South of Arkansas; the family moved north to Pittsburgh, her grandfather working the steel mills, then west to California for better work and a better chance. Her father's family had fled Louisiana decades earlier, in the early 1900s, escaping racial terror after the lynching of her great-grandmother's husband; her father was born during the Great Depression on Skid Row. A fourth-generation Los Angeles native, Hannah now builds power between L.A. and Washington, D.C.

Faith shaped her before strategy did. Ordained at sixteen through her parents' ministry, San Diego for Jesus Prayer Mountain Ministries, she has never gone by the title Reverend; her ministry is the work itself. Her calling has always been justice and repair: liberation theology, culture, and storytelling, rooted in the 400-year freedom tradition of the Black prophetic church that helped raise her. A core part of her life's work is building power with that church.

That was Hannah's first blueprint for power.

Then life gave her the rest.

Gun violence entered early, shots running through the alley at night, learning to get low before she understood why, witnessing two teenage girls shot outside her home at four years old, losing family and friends to the conditions this country treats as inevitable. Years later, when her own daughter sat in a classroom the same age as the children murdered at Sandy Hook, the crisis was no longer memory. It was motherhood.

Today, firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teens in America.

The war on drugs did not pass her family by. It took uncles, through addiction, the crack and AIDS epidemics, incarceration, and the kind of grief this country rarely counts with the dignity it deserves. Poverty shaped the architecture of daily life: time, housing, childcare, health, safety, transportation, and the futures families were allowed to imagine.

Education was both wound and promise. At nineteen, pregnant with her son, she was pushed out of college without the support she needed. Years later she returned as a divorced single mother, raising her children on campus so they would never believe higher education belonged to somebody else.

Health care left its own record. At 22, in active labor, in a domestic-violence marriage, with no license and no way to drive, she called an ambulance, and a nurse scolded her that an ambulance was “improper” for labor. No gown, no socks, no blood-pressure check; she was told to walk. She found socks in a drawer, tied her robe over her contractions, and walked the halls looking for a pay phone to call for help. The nurse was removed from her case.

Years later, her brother, David Paul Joseph Spates, sat in an emergency room for three days before he was given a bed. By the time he reached a room upstairs, it was too late. He was 31. She has lost uncles, brothers, and cousins, too many before the age of 35, and her father, to the same systemic neglect. Hannah herself nearly died of COVID-19, then helped build a faith-rooted public-health response that protected more than 22,000 people.

Again and again, she saw the same pattern: the people closest to the harm were kept farthest from the power to change it.

Then she did the thing they tell you never to do: she told the truth. She began to tell her own story, welfare, harm, loss, the things you are taught to hide, and discovered she was not the only one. What she had carried as private shame was a public-health crisis. So she began to testify. She organized people around shared stories, and taught communities and legislators alike how to turn pain into power and center those closest to it. That is where the strategist was born.

So she built toward the opposite.

The Advocacy League was born from that truth, a home for people tired of being told what is broken and ready to build the power to change it. A place to turn pain into purpose, purpose into strategy, strategy into action, and action into repair. A place to learn how government works, understand your rights, organize around what you share, tell the truth before the systems tell it for you, reach decision-makers, and move together at scale.

Democracy does not defend itself. Rights do not protect themselves. Repair does not arrive without power. And power begins when people know what they carry.

Know your power. Build your power. Wield your power. Leverage your power.

That is the work of The Advocacy League: building people power, advancing democracy, and repairing our nation.

The Big 12 Justice & Freedom Agenda exists because the issues shaping people's lives are connected: public safety, economic justice, criminal justice, democracy, health, reproductive freedom, education, housing, environment, technology, narrative power, and immigration.

A family navigating gun violence may also be navigating poverty, housing instability, medical neglect, school inequity, criminalization, and voter suppression, all at once. The League gives people a way to find their issue, understand the system behind it, and act on it with others.

Scripture tells us Deborah was a prophet, a judge, a strategist, and a mother in Israel. When the people were under threat, she rose with wisdom, courage, and alignment, and helped lead them toward deliverance.

“And the land had rest forty years.”, Judges 5:31

When Deborah led, the people did not just survive the battle. The land found rest. That is the word for this moment.

Black women have too often been asked to carry nations that refused to carry them back, families, movements, churches, classrooms, campaigns, elections, institutions, and democracies, often underpaid, pushed out, disbelieved, and denied the rest, resources, and safety their labor made possible. But Black women were not created for endless extraction. The suffering was never the assignment. Repair was.

“A man's gift maketh room for him, and bringeth him before great men.”, Proverbs 18:16

Gifts make room. But responsibility decides what we build once we enter it. The room is an assignment: to tell the truth, protect the vulnerable, build what the people need, and use power in service of repair.

“And who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”, Esther 4:14

This is not a call for Black women to carry more. It is a call for everyone to build differently: Trust Black women. Resource Black women. Protect Black women. Believe Black women. Follow Black women when they are leading with wisdom, courage, and alignment, and then join the work.

The Advocacy League is for the builders, for the mothers, the organizers, the students, the faith leaders, the artists, the voters, and the communities closest to harm. For everyone ready to build vibrant, just, equitable, healthy, and sustainable communities where all people have the power to thrive.