Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins

Current Company

Promise — Co-Founder & CEO

Technology for the Underserved

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins built her career at the intersection of social justice and systems design. As CEO of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council, she organized workers across Silicon Valley. As head of Green For All, she advocated for clean energy jobs in underserved communities. Each role taught her the same lesson: the systems that serve wealthy Americans — efficient billing, easy payment plans, digital reminders — simply don't exist for the poor.

In 2017, she co-founded Promise to fix one of the most punishing examples of this gap: the way government agencies collect fines, fees, and court-ordered payments. Instead of warrants and jail time for missed payments, Promise provides text reminders, flexible payment plans, and referrals to social services — using the same technology that subscription companies use to reduce churn, applied to keeping low-income people out of the criminal justice system.

Redesigning Government's Relationship with Poverty

Promise has partnered with counties and cities across the United States, demonstrating that technology-enabled payment plans dramatically reduce warrant issuance and incarceration for poverty-related offenses while actually increasing payment collection rates. The counterintuitive insight — that treating people with dignity and flexibility produces better financial outcomes than threats and enforcement — has made Promise a model for how government agencies can modernize their approach to poverty.

Ellis-Lamkins represents an emerging archetype: the social justice leader who moves from advocacy to company-building, recognizing that the most durable change comes from replacing broken systems with better ones rather than simply protesting the old ones. Her work at Promise addresses one of the most concrete mechanisms through which poverty becomes criminalized in America.