Leading DoSomething

In 2015, the DoSomething.org Board of Directors named Aria CEO.  She was as committed to making an impact on the organization itself as she was to their millions of members.  Recognizing the need to empower diversity within the organization and at the board level, she oversaw the first ever salary and pay equity overhaul, leading to 50% of the highest paid employees identifying as People of Color and 25% as Black.  She also led a Board of Directors evaluation and recruitment process which resulted in a Board that was 40% People of Color and 30% Black.

As CEO, she continued to grow the organization, surpassing 5 million members, representing 131 countries around the world, and doubling the organization’s cash reserves to 19 months of operating capital.

As DoSomething grew under her leadership, Aria led the way in forging a best-in-class organizational culture.  Every year that she was CEO, DoSomething made The Nonprofit Times’ list of “Best Nonprofits to Work For,” and it was listed as #2 on that list in both 2019 and 2020, her final two years as CEO.  DoSomething also maintained a consistent 4-star rating on Charity Navigator every year she was CEO, bringing it to 13 years in a row - a feat realized by less than 2% of nonprofits.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, Aria’s financial leadership positioned the organization to remain operational throughout the economic chaos and ensured that all staff members kept their full salary through at least the end of 2020.  By listening to her members, she also realized that volunteerism could be a critical social lifeline for teens who had been separated from their normal, in-person communities.  “Everyone in their lives is telling them what they CANNOT do,” she wrote, “so DoSomething is here to tell them what they CAN do to make things better.”

What they COULD do was volunteer to help isolated senior citizens, increase their financial literacy, look out for their own and their friends’ mental health, and participate in hundreds of other volunteer campaigns designed to keep them connected and engaged while physically separated from their peers. 

As politics and advocacy became increasingly important to their members and the future of the United States, Aria responded by focusing the organization on civic engagement and Get-Out-The-Vote initiatives.  She raised over $11 million in growth capital to support this shift, allowing DoSomething to register over 350,000 young people to vote, placing it in the top tier of youth voter registration organizations.  In 2021, she was a judge for the MacArthur Foundation’s Stronger Democracy Awards and continues to be passionate about voting rights and protecting our Democracy.

Data-Driven Decision-Making & Creating Movements

As a leader launching dozens of social impact projects, Aria drove engagement by prioritizing the issues that were most important to the volunteers with whom she worked.  To this end, she managed a data-driven decision-making process to understand the issues that were energizing those volunteers and to meet them where they were most likely to be.  That process included online surveys, focus groups, and other methods to develop the explicit data her teams used to determine interest areas, hone campaign messaging, and guide social media promotion.  For example, the DoSomething team found that a teen’s #1 worry wasn’t in fact getting into college, but paying for it.  Using this insight, DoSomething began to include scholarships as a part of their offering to young people which resulted in millions of young people finding out about DoSomething through this channel. 

“All that is important,” she said in a 2020 interview with The Future of Storytelling, “but what I think is more important is looking at implicit data.”  To that end, Aria focused on seeking out the insights that traditional data gathering might miss – like the overnight trends that might suggest a movement in the making.  By launching a Slack channel that digested Gen Z interests, by consistently making young people key team members listening to their voices, and by monitoring responses to campaign messaging for interest signals, Aria became uniquely able to keep her pulse on the issues that would galvanize volunteers to undertake transformative action.

Through DoSomething, her consulting work, and her strategic relationships with leading organizations in both the nonprofit and for-profit spaces, Aria became a key creator of youth-led movements throughout the United States and around the world.  From promoting bone marrow donations to overcome the racial disparity in donor match rates (“Give a Spit about Cancer”) to encouraging the donation of period supplies to homeless shelters, where homeless women often lack feminine hygiene products (“Power to the Period”), her teams developed highly effective processes for educating volunteers about a problem and building engagement around specific, effective calls to action that made their efforts as impactful as possible.

One of her favorite campaigns launched under leadership was “Sincerely Us”, a campaign that promoted religious tolerance while pushing back against the sinister rise of hate crimes against Muslim-Americans.  “Sincerely Us” empowered DoSomething members to create beautiful, home-made Happy Ramadan cards that DoSomething then delivered to every single mosque in the United States.

A gifted storyteller, committed activist, and highly effective communicator, Aria has been involved in every aspect of these campaigns, including ideation, partner development, funding, media creation, promotion, oversight, and management.  Throughout her career, Aria has been able to turn the native energy that young people possess for positive change into meaningful movements – tackling some of the most important issues of our time, including gun violence, homelessness, gender rights, LGBTQ+ rights, bullying, racial justice, sexual harassment, mental health, and many others.

Thought Leadership & Public Speaking

As an accomplished and energetic leader in movement making, business leadership, technology, and engaging young people for social change, Aria has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and Stanford’s Social Innovation Review; and she has been featured on CBS, CNN, Fox News, NBC, MSNBC, and other television channels, as well as in Hub Culture Davos.

Aria has spoken at hundreds of conferences and events as a keynote and featured speaker, and as a panelist.  She has appeared at Sustainable Brands, South by Southwest, the YGL Annual Summit in Buenos Aires, the Social Innovation Summit, Social Capital, the Nexus Global Youth Summit, Personal Democracy Forum, the Social Good Summit, HSBC’s annual International Women’s Day events, and many others. She has also been featured on numerous podcasts including Erica Keswin’s Left To Our Own Devices and Slate’s Who Run’s That?

Most notably, she was both a panelist and keynote speaker at the Aspen Ideas Festival; she appeared on a panel on youth unemployment at the WEF Annual Summit alongside the CEO of Publicis, the Prime Minister of Jordan, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Peter Diamond; and she presented at TedxJnJ.