12-year-old Mary-Pat Hector organized a sit-in because, even at that age, she knew the power of her voice.

“At the time, a friend of mine had just been killed,” Hector recalls. Now nearly 30, she looks back at her unbridled audacity in awe.

“I actually called out Reverend Al Sharpton. I said, My mom forces me to listen to you every day, but why aren’t you doing anything in places like Stone Mountain where people I know are dying?”

That bold moment launched what would become a lifelong career in advocacy. Sharpton responded by sending his National Action Network team to Georgia—and by 13, Hector was a fixture in the movement.

“I served as their National Youth Director for 10 years before pivoting and coming to work here at Rise,” she says.

Now nearly 30, Hector is part of a new class of zillennial leaders redefining what it means to have power in the workplace. As the CEO of Rise, she oversees a multimillion-dollar civic organization that employs more than 250,000 students and supporters nationwide to organize around college affordability, food insecurity, and voter engagement. Her job doesn’t fit neatly into a corporate mold—and that’s the point.

“I always knew this was something that I wanted to do—help people,” she says. “But I didn’t have to be poor doing it.”

Hector’s story mirrors a larger trend sweeping through the Gen Z and millennial workforce: the rise of sociopolitical corporate leadership. No longer content to separate their professional ambitions from their values, many young leaders are treating advocacy as a viable career path—one that blends purpose with profitability and structure with soul.

A survey by Weber Shandwick with United Minds and KRC Research reported that 48% of Gen Z and millennials say they are “employee activists” (i.e., participating in speaking up about employer or societal issues), compared with 33% of Gen X and 27% of baby boomers.

At Rise, Hector has made it her mission to prove that civic work can be both sustainable and scalable.

“When I began working here, I realized they had real resources,” she says. “At the time, I asked, ‘Why aren’t we investing in historically Black colleges and universities?’ So I brought that lens into the work. I wanted young people to know that they don’t have to be a free intern—that their work has value.”

Under her leadership, Rise has doubled its staff, expanded its reach into new states, and paid hundreds of college students and young organizers for their efforts.

“Last year during the election cycle, we had over 250 young people on staff—all of them paid a full or part-time salary,” she notes. “Every student who knocked on a door or made a phone call was compensated.”

It’s a vision of civic engagement that feels distinctly millennial: purpose-driven, collaborative, and unwilling to sacrifice fair pay in the name of altruism. Hector says Rise’s funding model—built on a mix of foundation grants and individual donors—was designed to support that philosophy. “Our work is funded by people who believe in the next generation of civically engaged leaders,” she explains.

Her leadership path, however, wasn’t without hesitation. “When I was offered the CEO position, Rise was already a multimillion-dollar organization,” she recalls. “The first thing I thought was, ‘Who’s going to pay all these people?’ I knew a lot of Black women CEOs who were put in these roles and not given the support to succeed. I didn’t want to become another statistic.”

But she took the leap—and learned that scaling purpose work requires the same skills as running any company: fundraising, team building, and risk management.

“Someone said to me, ‘If you don’t take the job, you’ll always work for someone else,’” she says. “And beyond that, how will you learn to fund the movement? That made sense to me.”

Since then, Hector has led Rise through its largest fundraising years ever and secured multi-year grants that stabilized operations.

“I often look back at the girl who was afraid to take this role because of the what-ifs,” she says. “But I’ve been in community with Black women who said, ‘Don’t be afraid of falling.’ Falling doesn’t always mean failure—it just means a lesson learned.” Read the full article here on Forbes.com.

By Jasmine Browley, Contributor. Nov. 04, 2025, 10:25 am EST.