The Raben Group

As a principal in The Raben Group’s Issue Campaigns practice area, Shanna Gong uses her expertise in campaign strategy, messaging development, and coalition building to help clients advance their missions and create positive change. 

Shanna came to Raben from FWD.us, where she spent nearly ten years advocating for immigration and criminal justice reform. She helped pioneer FWD.us’ work on criminal justice reform work, researching and building out the scope and focus of an entirely new vertical. Shanna led legislative and ballot campaigns in Oklahoma, where she managed a diverse bipartisan coalition and passed seven sentencing and parole reforms. 

While at FWD.us, Shanna developed and launched Project Commutation, an innovative storytelling campaign aimed at commuting the sentences of people serving decades for drug possession. The campaign led to the release of over 400 people in the largest single-day commutation in the country and garnered national coverage from NBC News, USA Today, The Hill, and The Washington Post. Shanna also co-authored Every Second: The Impact of Incarceration on Families, a report in collaboration with researchers at Cornell University and the University of Chicago, that provided the first-ever national estimate of Americans who have experienced familial incarceration. 

Shanna holds bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two young daughters. On weekends, Shanna can be found coaching soccer, cooking, and playing the piano.