The Transformation: Building What’s Next (Vol. 2, No. 3)

By Dahab Hagos-Fewell

The Shift | Vol. 2, No. 3 – “We have to build our own power”: Women’s Fight Endures

Designing Power, Not Just Opportunity

There’s a difference between access and power.

Access means being invited into a system that already exists. Power means having a hand in shaping that system in the first place.

For too long, workforce and education systems have focused on access. We’ve worked to open doors, expand pipelines, and increase representation, and while those efforts matter, they often leave the underlying structure untouched. The rules remain the same, the outcomes remain uneven, and the burden of adaptation continues to fall on those the system was never designed to support.

At LeadersUp, we are pushing beyond opportunity. We are designing for power.

This shift is rooted in a simple but urgent truth: economic justice requires more than participation. It requires ownership. It requires the ability to influence how decisions are made, how resources are distributed, and how success is defined.

In my role in the Transformation Office, I see this play out every day. Our work is not just to deliver projects, but to make sure we are always thinking about redesigning the conditions under which those projects exist. That means building systems that don’t just include young people, but position them as co-authors of the future economy.

One of the biggest structural challenges we see is fragmentation. Funders operate in one lane. employers in another, education systems in another, and young people are expected to navigate the gaps between them. The result is not a lack of talent, but a lack of alignment.

To address this, we’ve focused on building infrastructure that intentionally connects these systems. Internally, that shows up through our collaboration tools, cross-functional project design, and shared accountability practices that align teams around a common goal: creating pathways that are not only accessible, equitable, and sustainable.

Externally, this work comes to life through initiatives like LA Economic Empowerment Alliance (LAEEA) and Activate LAEEA. In these efforts, we are not just coordinating activity; we are convening stakeholders across sectors to build shared vision, language, and infrastructure for the field. By bringing together funders, employers, community-based organizations, and system leaders, we are creating the conditions for more focused, aligned approaches to economic mobility. This is what it looks like to move from fragmented efforts to collective power.

But alignment alone is not enough. Power must be embedded into the process itself.

That’s where our Design for Equity approach comes in. Through phases of assess, discover, design, deploy, learn, and amplify, we ensure that community voice is not an afterthought, but a driver of decision-making. We are not asking young people to react to pre-built solutions; we are inviting them to shape the systems that will shape their lives in the long term.

This approach reflects a long legacy of leadership from women who understood that systems change is not optional when survival is on the line. Leaders like Fannie Lou Hamer made it clear decades ago that political rights without economic power would never be enough.

Fannie Lou Hamer did not simply advocate for political rights, she built the Freedom Farm Cooperative because she understood that voting rights without economic stability would never be enough. Her work made clear that power is not abstract. It is material, structural, and it must be built.

Today, we see that same leadership in the young women and community leaders we partner with. They are not waiting for systems to catch up, they are naming what is broken, challenging what is inequitable, and helping to design what comes next.

At LeadersUp, our role is to support that leadership by building the infrastructure that allows it to scale. We translate vision into systems. We connect partners across sectors, and we ensure that the work is not only implemented but sustained.

Because opportunity can be offered, but power must be designed.And when power is designed with intention, it does more than change outcomes. It changes the rules.

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Dahab Hagos-Fewell is the Vice President, Head of Transformation at LeadersUp, driving organizational alignment and cross-functional execution across the organization’s portfolios.