Alexis McGill Johnson, a career-long freedom fighter, is president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. She leads the most trusted name in sexual health and the nation's most influential provider and advocate of sexual and reproductive care amid intense threats to bodily autonomy in the U.S. Alexis has been at the helm of Planned Parenthood since 2019, guiding the venerable organization through the tumult of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, reversing 50 years of precedent and ending the federal right to abortion. And she has led the charge, alongside movement partners, to defend reproductive freedom even as state bans continue to block care and strip people’s ability to control their own life and future.
Throughout her tenure, Alexis has worked to strengthen Planned Parenthood and expand access to care. She has shepherded the historic growth of direct affiliate support; led sustained fundraising increases — more than $379 million in fiscal year 2025 alone; and secured the largest single donation in Planned Parenthood history: $275 million from MacKenzie Scott. Under Alexis's direction, expansive revenue-sharing models have delivered nearly $1 billion to local Planned Parenthood affiliates to help ensure the long-term stability of community-based health centers across the country. With the launch of a comprehensive 50-state strategy, Alexis has stabilized infrastructure and worked to advance health equity. As head of the Action Fund, she has overseen major ballot victories to protect abortion rights and mobilized tens of thousands of volunteers nationwide. Largely through Alexis's efforts to fight back stigma, shift culture and amplify reproductive freedom as central to democracy, the issue is at the forefront of national political and cultural discourse.
During her career, Alexis has bridged scholarship, organizing, and institutional strategy. After earning degrees from Princeton and Yale University, she grounded her work in the study of race, democracy, and public systems teaching political science and African American studies at Yale and Wesleyan University. Demonstrating the power of culture as a vehicle for electoral strategy, she went on to spearhead highly visible civic engagement efforts that mobilized young voters, expanded youth political participation as political director of Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, and executive director of Citizen Change — where she helped lead the iconic 2004 “Vote or Die!” campaign.
Alexis co-founded the Perception Institute in 2009, a research organization focused on bias reduction and structural inequity, and served as executive director for more than a decade. She advised corporations, nonprofits, and public institutions on building racially and gender-inclusive cultures and co-created the curriculum for Starbucks’ 2018 nationwide racial bias training.
She has served on the boards of Color of Change, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the New York Civil Liberties Union, and other civic and policy organizations. She is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. Alexis lives in New York with her husband and two daughters.
In a word: equity.
Despite the distractions animating our current cultural wars, the truth is everyone wants fair outcomes. And yet, what I know for sure is that committing to real equity work means knowing that the people most harmed are the people most worth protecting and asking if we are willing to believe that someone else’s pain matters more than our own fears or discomfort. That’s not just a word, it's a calling.
That truth runs through every chapter of my professional life. At Yale and Wesleyan, it meant building inclusive curricula centering radical movement building and systems change even over work that called for promoted incremental policy fixes. At Citizen Change, it meant connecting Black and Brown youth to their inherent political power even over building programs for voters looking more for a situationship. Co-founding Perception Institute meant looking at macro patterns of bias, particularly racial bias, through a fresh lens, science, and rigor, and asking the questions that transform organizations even over personal anti-bias growth work which simply leaves hierarchy intact.
Now, at Planned Parenthood, one of the things I’m most proud of is our Black Health Equity Initiative which builds care around those who face the steepest odds (Black women are three times more likely to die due to pregnancy-related complications) as a methodology to raise the floor for every patient we serve. What has become undeniable to me through these efforts is that our job cannot be to make people more comfortable inside the current system, but to reset the terms and realign the hierarchy itself and ask those of us with privilege to occupy a different place in it for the elevation of us all.
At bottom, equity is not just a value, it's a discipline. It means going to our most uncomfortable pain points on purpose and having the hard conversations about the tradeoffs necessary to live our real values and then ruthlessly prioritizing our work to get there. Equity means confronting, but not dwelling on, our own blind spots so that we can recognize broader collective patterns to understand where we are falling short and why. Last, equity is a promise – that we ask ourselves - what do we owe the people with the least power in the room. This is the thread I have returned to throughout my leadership.
I don’t see those things in conflict – that’s the job. Movements are made of moments. The work is situating the moment inside the larger mission so the moment doesn’t pass, it accumulates into something. That means balancing 15-day tactics with a 15-year strategy. It means leveraging every crisis with an eye towards long-term progress while inspiring people to keep fighting by naming the vision they are fighting toward – not just putting out the fire in front of them.
The Dobbs decision is the clearest example. Overturning Roe was a seismic moment. We spent years fighting tooth and nail to stop it. But we had also been preparing for a future without federal protection — and for the fight to win it back. So when the decision came down, we were ready. Our health centers were ready. We had a vision for weathering the immediate storm and coming out stronger: patient navigation systems to help people travel for abortion care, expanded telehealth, litigation against all the freedom deniers. And then we began charting the next steps on a path to get back into the U.S. Constitution.
That’s the job, always. Respond to the moment in a way that advances the mission. Not instead of it.
Younger people bring a healthy skepticism of the status quo. They don’t settle for antiquated systems, and they don’t buy old excuses about why something can’t be done differently. That challenges our assumptions and pushes us in new directions.
They also came up being told to bring their full selves to work. Where previous generations, myself included, learned to compartmentalize and code-switch, to better carry what our parents called ‘the Black tax’: show up twice as hard to get half as far. I’d assumed that navigation was simply the cost of admission. Younger staff don’t. Where I saw a path, they see a pattern of disparity. They want authentic connection — and they demand authenticity from their leaders too.
Early in my tenure, that demand got tested directly. A private conversation among our Black staff in a space built for them to process their experience inside our own organization was leaked publicly. It was painful, and it exposed something I hadn’t fully reckoned with: we had an expectations gap and a trust gap. We’d presumed a level of trust that didn’t actually exist. What the mind sciences call the stress of racial disappointment – the toll it takes when an organization talks the talk but doesn’t walk it – is real, and younger staff aren’t willing to just carry that dissonance quietly anymore.
And that’s the biggest thing they are getting right: accountability. They don’t defer, and they don’t accept excuses. They tell you plainly: "You said you were going to do the work, you didn't do it, and now we're going to hold you to it.” That forces leaders like me to stop treating equity like a personal competency to refine and start treating it as a responsibility. When we talk about equity and belonging — it can’t be a values statement. It is whether people are seen as peers — or future peers — and are worth real investment. Younger leaders won’t let us forget that. And honestly, I don’t want them to.
Diet Coke? Just kidding. No — I think the real answer is being able to advance ideas by bringing everyone into the conversation. You can have the best idea in the world, but you need to be able to expand the conversation and draw people in. It’s that famous proverb: "If you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together.”
I’m a professor at heart. I love being able to draw out different perspectives to create a fuller picture and identify patterns. That’s how you see trends, like the erosion of our democracy, that don’t always announce themselves in dramatic fashion. It’s how you put concepts like diversity, racial competence, and intersectionality — which can be abstract — at the center of the work. When you’re bringing diverse perspectives directly into the conversation, it’s harder to treat the ideas like a side-hustle. They become the work.
I admire women who show up as the freest version of themselves every single day. Women who know their value and have zero interest in compromising themselves or playing by the rules that others set for them. One of my mentors was the late Grace Lee Boggs. She was a leading human rights activist, philosopher, and feminist from Detroit. Grace was born in 1915, five years before the 19th Amendment. She lived to be 100 years old.
Throughout her life, institutions never knew quite what to do with her. She was an ethnically Chinese woman married to a Black man. She was a brilliant scholar, but the academic establishment at the time couldn’t see a place for her. She created her own rules, and became a luminary across movements: civil rights, Black power, labor, feminism, and more. Her value was innate. No one ever had to hand it to her.
When women see other women refusing to compromise or diminish themselves, they’re inspired. It’s contagious. Other women see it and it changes what they think is possible. And when individual behaviors shift at scale, political change follows.
I first met Grace after giving a donation to her organization. Then out of nowhere she called me. She didn’t call to say thank you. She called with a question – who was I, and why did I want to give to her? What felt like jarring stewardship in the moment turned out to be the whole lesson: she wanted to know if I was really about the work, or if I was just writing a check. The movement, she assured me, could not afford the latter. And it reminded me that even when you think you are supporting and investing, it is actually the other way around.
I used to run cross country so I can’t live without a good, long run. I truly appreciate the well documented benefits of stillness practices like yoga and meditation but somehow I’ve never learned to quiet my mind long enough to sink into them. I’d rather lace up on my own schedule at my own convenience and meander through the woods for as long as I can. A hard workout is self-care.
I love seeing people step into their power locally. We’re seeing real grassroots energy around everything from abortion access to data center construction. People are sort of re-discovering these avenues to stand up for themselves.
Speaking of standing up…I‘m also loving Sneex, the shoes made by Spanx founder Sara Blakely. No other designers are thinking about women’s comfort when they make heels. I could wear those from my house at the beginning of the day through multiple airports and events. 24 hours later, my feet will not hurt when I walk into a room standing up and standing tall. I am not being paid to endorse Sneex but I would not be mad at a PP x SNEEX collab in power pink so we can make them our official marching shoe!
I’m going to date myself, but I always come back to The Battle of Algiers. It’s a 1966 movie about Algerian rebels against the French government in North Africa. It’s this gritty portrayal of urban war and brutal, colonial oppression…but it’s also about the power of self-determination. It basically ends with the French colonialists successfully rooting out the movement leadership in Algiers which feels like a gut punch after being so invested in the fight for independence. But then the last scene cuts to a scene of ordinary Algerians marching for independence. It's a reminder that movements are made for the long game and they need a long view and a multi-generational army. Movements don’t live or die with their leaders. That, to me, has always been a powerful message.
