Encode Justice Oregon

Encode Justice Oregon (EJ-OR) is the Oregon state chapter of Encode Justice, the youth-led international AI-policy advocacy organization founded by Sneha Revanur in 2020. The chapter recruits across Oregon high-school and college student networks and is one of three Encode chapters — alongside the North Carolina chapter and the Georgia chapter — that joined the Electronic Frontier Alliance, EFF's now-concluded grassroots civil-liberties network. Public contact runs through the chapter's Instagram account (@encode.or); EFF's EFA directory entry lists the chapter as statewide and based in the western region of Oregon.

Place in the Encode Justice network and the EFA

EFF's December 2024 Electronic Frontier Alliance year-in-review introduces the Georgia chapter as "the third Encode Justice to join EFA" in the 2024 new-member cohort, which places Oregon as one of the two earlier Encode-chapter EFA joiners — the North Carolina chapter, the subject of EFF's June 2024 spotlight, being the other. The Electronic Frontier Alliance itself concluded on 20 November 2025, so the alliance relationship is now historical rather than ongoing, but the EFA affiliation gave the chapter visibility inside the wider U.S. digital-rights coalition and a peer network of community organizations during the chapter's formative years.

Chapter founding, leadership, and Portland-metro anchor

The chapter's LinkedIn company page records it as founded in 2022, based in Portland (postal area 97006, which sits in the Beaverton / west-Portland-metro band of Washington County), and describing itself as "Oregon's ONLY fully youth-led group mobilizing for equitable & ethical AI and ML legislation & education." The same page describes the chapter as a team of thirteen students from across Oregon and names two leaders by school affiliation: Alena Dasha Peethala, then a student at the International School of Beaverton, and Sahana Srinivasan, then a student at Jesuit High School in Portland. Neither is independently in the corpus; both are recorded here as the chapter's named leadership rather than as Person entries, in keeping with this corpus's sourcing rule that Person entries below the public-sourcing threshold are not created.

Activities

The chapter's documented programmatic threads, as recorded across its EFA spotlight context, its LinkedIn company page, and its named leaders' public profiles, are three:

• K-12 AI policy drafting and presentation to the Beaverton School District. Peethala's public LinkedIn record of her Encode Justice Oregon role describes drafting sample K-12 AI policies and presenting them to the Beaverton School District's Chief Information Officer, alongside advocacy for standardised implementation of computer-science courses across the district. Beaverton is the school district in which the chapter is anchored; the district subsequently published Generative AI Responsible Use Guidelines under its Teaching & Learning function.
• Statewide policy, educational slideshows, and teacher / community-leader outreach. Peethala's public profile describes the chapter as having led a team of students from across Oregon on policy drafting, educational slideshows, and outreach to teachers and community leaders, with human-centred AI advocacy as the framing.
• AI Policy Summer Camp with Civics Unplugged. The chapter's LinkedIn company page recently promoted a free online AI Policy Summer Camp (11-13 August) for middle schoolers and freshmen, co-developed with Civics Unplugged, the youth civic-leadership fellowship organisation. The camp targets a younger student audience than the chapter's high-school-and-college recruiting base, extending the chapter's reach into the middle-school pipeline.

Posture in the movement

EJ-OR 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 — Oregon high-school and college students, families in Oregon school districts shaping K-12 AI policy, and the wider Portland-metro civic-policy audience — in shaping how AI is built and deployed at the state and district level. Its distinctive contribution inside the Encode Justice chapter network, as documented to date, is the school-district K-12 AI-policy thread anchored at Beaverton and the explicit pairing of state-level student organising with a middle-school summer-camp pipeline co-run with Civics Unplugged, rather than the city-council legislative-lobbying accent of the North Carolina chapter or the chapter-run essay-contest scholarship of the Georgia chapter. The chapter also gives the corpus its first Pacific-Northwest local-group entry — sitting outside the corpus's existing US local-group cluster of the Bay Area (PauseAI Bay Area), the New York / east-coast PauseAI organising base, the Research Triangle anchor of the NC Encode chapter, and the Atlanta-metro anchor of the GA Encode chapter — and is the corpus's first Portland-metro local-group anchor.