Encode Justice California

Encode Justice California (EJ-CA) is the California state chapter — and founding chapter — of Encode Justice, the youth-led international AI-policy advocacy organization. The chapter was born in July 2020 when Sneha Revanur founded Encode Justice as a 15-year-old student at Evergreen Valley High School in San José, California, initially as a campaign against California Proposition 25 — a ballot measure that would have replaced the state's cash bail system with pretrial risk assessment algorithms. Unlike the North Carolina, Oregon, and Georgia chapters, EJ-CA carries no Electronic Frontier Alliance affiliation; its distinctive position in the Encode network is as the origin chapter — the student organizing group from which the entire 40+ state, 30-country network grew. Public contact runs through the chapter's Instagram account (@encodejusticeca).

Founding context and California's role as the network's origin

Encode Justice was founded in July 2020 when Revanur, then a sophomore at Evergreen Valley High School in San José's Evergreen district, encountered California Proposition 25. The measure, on the November 2020 state ballot, would have ended cash bail and replaced it statewide with algorithmic risk assessment tools. Revanur rallied classmates and students from other San José–area schools, organized town halls, wrote opinion pieces, and ran phone and text campaigns opposing the measure. Voters rejected Proposition 25 in November 2020 with nearly 56 percent voting "No." Rather than disbanding after that win, Revanur and the core California student group broadened their scope — the California chapter and the national organization grew from the same root — shifting focus to surveillance, disinformation, and job displacement alongside criminal-justice algorithmic accountability. By 2023 the organization had chapters in over 40 states and 30 countries with more than 600 high school and college student members; the California chapter remains the home-state anchor of the network and the chapter most directly associated with the national org's Silicon Valley founding geography.

Programs

The California chapter's documented programmatic output runs across two distinct threads:

• EJ on Air podcast. The chapter produces EJ on Air, a podcast describing the risks of discriminatory algorithms — one of the earliest public-facing content outputs associated specifically with the California chapter. The podcast extends the chapter's educational and public-awareness remit beyond school-workshop formats into an audio medium accessible to a wider California and national audience.
• AI in the Startup World Summit at UC Berkeley. The chapter partnered with AI policy organizations to host an AI in the Startup World Summit at UC Berkeley, teaching students about how AI startups can catalyze social impact. The event positions the California chapter at the intersection of the state's tech-startup ecosystem and youth AI-policy organizing — a framing distinctive to a Bay Area anchor chapter operating in close proximity to Silicon Valley's venture and startup culture.

Posture in the movement

EJ-CA is a clear in-scope local group for the corpus: a youth-led, geographically anchored chapter of an in-corpus national organization that engages non-AI publics — California high-school and college students, students in Silicon Valley school districts affected by algorithmic-decision-making and data-surveillance programmes, and the state-level civic-policy audience around California AI legislation — in shaping how AI is built and deployed. Its defining position in the Encode Justice network is historical and structural rather than programmatic: this is the founding chapter, the student organizing group at a San José high school that became the seed of the entire global Encode network. In the corpus's California landscape, EJ-CA sits alongside PauseAI Bay Area as the Bay Area's two explicitly AI-policy-focused local groups; EJ-CA's youth-led chapter structure and Encode-network lineage distinguish it from PauseAI Bay Area's professional-organizer base. As the founding state for the largest US youth AI-policy chapter network, California's representation in the local-group layer has been structurally underweighted relative to its role as the movement's origin point — this entry closes that gap.