Lourdes Rivera, JD
New York, NY
President

Lourdes Rivera is the Senior Vice President, U.S. Programs for the Center for Reproductive Rights where she is an executive of the Center, providing vision and strategic guidance to its state, federal, and foreign policy programs in the U.S. This includes overseeing all aspects of program strategy and implementation, including shaping the legal and policy landscape on reproductive rights, as well as building and leveraging new strategic alliances to advance the Center’s goals.

Lourdes most recently served as Senior Program Officer at the Ford Foundation where for close to 10 years she designed and implemented the Foundation’s U.S. and global grantmaking strategy in sexual and reproductive health and rights, using a social justice and human rights approach. Before joining the Ford Foundation in 2006, Lourdes was the Managing Attorney of the Los Angeles office of the National Health Law Program (NHeLP) and specialized in issues relating to Medicaid, managed care, and women’s and children’s health. In 1996, she created and directed NHeLP’s Initiative to Promote Access to Reproductive Health Care for Low-Income Women. Previously, she worked in Washington D.C. as a Senior Associate with the Children’s Defense Fund, Health Division, and as a Georgetown Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow with the National Women’s Law Center.

She is a co-founder of California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, the Groundswell Fund, as well as the funder affinity group, Philanthropy for Women’s Human Rights. Lourdes served as a former Board chair of the National Women’s Health Network, former co-chair of the American Bar Association’s Health Rights and Bioethics Committee of the Individual Rights and Responsibilities Section (now known as Civil Rights and Justice Section), and former member of the IRR Section Council. She has served on the Action Board of the American Public Health Association (APHA), as section counselor to APHA’s Population, Family Planning and Reproductive Health Section, and as a member of its Latino Caucus. She was an active member and former Board Treasurer of the Funders Network on Population Family Planning and Reproductive Health and Rights and served as the co-chair of its Women of Color Working Group. She currently serves on the Boards of the National Health Law Program and the Brush Foundation.

Lourdes has a J.D. from Yale Law School and a B.A. in Latin American studies from Yale University. She is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, where she teaches a graduate-level course in Health and Human Rights.

Elizabeth Stites, PhD*
Budapest, Hungary
Vice President

Elizabeth Stites, PhD. is a Research Director at the Feinstein International Center of Tufts University, where she researches the livelihoods of conflict-affected populations. Focusing on experiences at the individual, household, and community level, her research aims to inform and improve international and national policy. She always examines gender and generational differences in her research. She has led research in Turkey (on Syria), Nepal, Uganda, South Africa, Bosnia, and Afghanistan.

Judith Wright, M.Ed.
Lakewood, OH

Judy Wright’s career has spanned the fields of community organizing, education, and philanthropy, always with a focus on advancing social justice. Currently, Judy is the Director of the Ohio Transformation Fund, a collaborative fund developed by national and local funders to make structural changes in Ohio’s criminal justice system in order to improve safety and health in Ohio’s communities. Judy graduated from Northwestern University with a B.S., cum laude, in Education and Social Policy and earned an M.Ed at Cleveland State University with a focus on Adult Learning and Development. With an interest in popular education and transformational learning, Judy has conducted field research in Chicago, Cleveland, and Bolivia. Her research on popular education in Cochabamba, Bolivia, served as the basis for several published articles and presentations. Judy’s work as a community organizer in Chicago and Ohio focused on issue campaigns including education, immigrant rights, and health access. As a project director at Ohio’s Planned Parenthood affiliate, Judy led the design and implementation of initiatives to address cultural barriers to care for the LGBT and immigrant community. From 2009-2010, Judy served as a Fellow in Robert Wood Johnson’s Ladder to Leadership eighteen-month fellowship for emerging leaders in Cleveland’s public health sector. Judy lives in Lakewood, Ohio, with her husband, Walter, and their children, Lila and Iris.

Mike Brickner, M.A.
Wilmington, Delaware

Mike Brickner joined the ACLU of Delaware as its Executive Director in May 2020. Prior to this role, he served as Ohio State Director for All Voting is Local, a campaign that fights to protect and expand the right to vote for every American. He previously served as the Senior Policy Director at the ACLU of Ohio. During his 14-year tenure at the ACLU, Brickner has worked on a variety of critical civil liberties movements. These include conceiving campaigns to expand and protect the right to vote, ensuring LGBTQ people are free from discrimination, and promoting reforms to Ohio’s criminal justice system. These campaigns resulted in systemic reforms to enact online voter registration; ensure voters have access to evening and weekend early in-person voting opportunities; expand access to the ballot for people in the criminal justice system; combat contemporary debtors’ prisons; end burdensome pay-to-stay jail fees, fight the use of prisons for profit; and promote legislation that would prohibit discrimination against people on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Brickner earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Hiram College and a master’s degree from Cleveland State University’s Diversity Management Program.

Abigail English, JD
Chapel Hill, NC

Abigail English is a lawyer, researcher, and advocate for the rights of vulnerable young people. Since 1999, she has directed the Center for Adolescent Health & the Law, a nonprofit organization in Chapel Hill, North Carolina that works nationally to support laws and policies that promote the health of adolescents and their access to comprehensive health care. Her research and advocacy have focused on health insurance and public financing of care for adolescents and young adults, consent, and confidentiality protections, and sexual and reproductive health care. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and her law degree from UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law.

She has taught at the UC Berkeley School of Public Policy, the Boalt Hall School of Law, and the Gillings Global School of Public Health at UNC Chapel Hill. She was a Gallagher Lecturer for the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine in 1987, and she received the Child Advocacy Award from the American Bar Association Young Lawyers Division in 1997 and the Outstanding Achievement Award in Adolescent Medicine from the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine in 2000. She was the Frieda L. Miller Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2010-2011. Her current work focuses on the problem of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of adolescents and young adults.

Sarah R. Kelley, M.S.
Washington, DC

Sarah Kelley has over 15 years of experience working at the intersection of philanthropy, sustainability, and equity. She is the founder and Principal of Common Threads Consulting, working with philanthropic clients to provide strategy development, landscape analysis, and research, impact assessment, and facilitation. She also currently serves as Consultant and Project Director to Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Funders (SAFSF) for a Special Project on integrated funding and impact investment strategies in sustainable fiber and textiles.

Previously, Sarah served for 10 years as Senior Program Officer at Island Foundation, where she directed the Environment portfolio and managed $1.2 million in annual grants. She also developed and implemented a program on equity, inclusion, and environmental justice for the foundation, including an innovative cohort-based model for grantee equity training. Prior to joining the foundation, Sarah was Executive Director of a nonprofit dedicated to preserving and expanding sustainable farming and access to local food.

Sarah is a Board member of the New England Grassroots Environment Fund, where she serves as Treasurer and has helped support the development of an innovative participatory grantmaking process. She was also selected as a 2018-19 RSF Social Finance Integrated Capital Fellow, focusing on integrating investment and grantmaking strategies to drive change. She holds an M.S. in Plant and Soil Sciences from the University of Massachusetts and a B.A. in History from Yale.

Ellen Liu, M.A.
Washington, DC

Description Ellen Liu has over ten years of experience in grantmaking, organizational development, policy advocacy, and capacity building with health and social justice organizations. As the Ms. Foundation’s Director of Women’s Health, Ellen manages grantmaking and programmatic activities in the areas of reproductive and sexual health, rights and justice, and women and HIV/AIDS policy.

Prior to joining the Foundation, Ellen was Program Officer for the Open Society Foundation’s Public Health Program, where she worked with health and human rights organizations in Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and East and Southern Africa to strengthen national accountability mechanisms and advance policies and protections for people living with HIV/AIDS and TB, people with mental disabilities, ethnic minorities, and people in need of palliative care. While at OSF, Ellen helped launch new initiatives in monitoring health budgets to empower communities to hold governments accountable for their spending and supported activists to use innovative social media tools and strengthen their voices in shaping the policies that most affect them. Prior to OSF, Ellen worked as a consultant for a number of organizations including the UN World Food Program, Mount Sinai Medical Center, and the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs. She currently serves on the steering committee of the Asian Women Giving Circle.here

Alison Looman, JD
New York, NY

Alison Looman serves Senior Investment Counsel for the Ford Foundation. She is responsible for all legal aspects of the foundation’s endowment and investment activity, as well as its impact investing work, in particular, its $1 billion mission-related investment endowment.

Prior to joining the foundation in 2019, Alison was an asset management associate at Sidley Austin LLP and then a director and senior legal counsel at Cambridge Associates, where she provided advice to endowment, foundation, pension plan, and high net worth discretionary accounts investing in private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, impact investments, and separately managed accounts.

Alison volunteers as a French language translator with Respond Crisis Translation, which provides interpretation and translation services for migrants, refugees, and others, in asylum petitions, court cases, and otherwise. She received her J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.