Lorelei Williams Named Interim Executive Director

We are happy to announce the appointment of Lorelei Williams as the Interim Executive Director of Hidden Leaf Foundation. Supriya Lopez Pillai, who has led Hidden Leaf (HL) brilliantly for the last six years, is moving on to a new role as the President of Libra Foundation in mid-August, and Lorelei will help ensure HL’s ongoing institutional health and vibrancy through this transition. Working closely with our board and staff, she will support HL’s learning at this stage of its five-year grantmaking cycle, oversee day to day operations, ensure ongoing progress on community investments and funder engagement, and lay the groundwork for HL’s permanent Executive Director.

 

Lorelei brings with her a wealth of experience in promoting inner awareness within liberatory movements. She also knows Hidden Leaf well: for several years, Lorelei served as our grantmaking consultant and she developed a report documenting our programmatic impact and organizational evolution over our initial 20 years of operation. “We are excited that Lorelei is joining Hidden Leaf as our Interim ED. Lorelei brings so much to the role including her deep experience in social justice philanthropy, institution building, and transformative change,” shared Karie Brown, HL Board Chair. “We are grateful to Lorelei for stepping forward during this transition so that Hidden Leaf can continue its forward momentum as it embarks on its search for a permanent executive director.”

 

Prior to joining Hidden Leaf, Lorelei served as founding Executive Director of the Warner Music Group Social Justice Fund. Under her leadership, the Fund grew from its concept phase into a high-impact grantmaking institution operating across six global markets and stewarded $35M+ in grants in the areas of racial and gender justice, LGBTQ+ rights, criminal legal reform, arts and culture. Throughout her career, Williams has been deeply committed to resourcing global racial justice movements that integrate healing, organizing and advocacy.

 

“Having witnessed Hidden Leaf’s tremendous growth and impact over the years, it’s a pleasure to partner with its board, staff, and community partners in this time of transition,” Lorelei said. “As we face unprecedented political and planetary change, the practice of transformative movement building fueled by HL partners is more vital than ever. We must stay focused, build political, economic and spiritual power and remain undaunted in our fight for collective liberation.”

 

Please join us in welcoming Lorelei to Hidden Leaf.

 

And to give you a better sense of who Lorelei is and all she brings to the role, we are including a recent piece of her poetry.

 

Ancestral Intelligence
~ Lorelei Williams

In this season
of solar tantrums
bomb cyclones,
failed coups, toxic air
wildfires, genocide
we are warned:

Keep watch. link arms.
resist. remember:
abeng, umkhonto, palenké.
conjure freedom.
plant trees. quilt. tend.
remember to rest.
breathe. wail. dance.
the fight is fierce
but the lineage, long.

Remember: even
when you tire, rage,
grieve in disbelief,
you cannot predict the end.
politicians, pundits,
corporations, colonizers
do not have the last word.

We have rewritten history
with blood memory
time and time again.
we are the phoenix rising,
the beginning and the end.
there is more to the story
if you pick up your pen.

by Admin

Hidden Leaf Announces the Transition of Executive Director, Supriya Lopez Pillai

Six years ago, Hidden Leaf Foundation began a new chapter as we welcomed Supriya Lopez Pillai as Executive Director, taking the baton from Tara Brown who had led the foundation for seventeen years.  Supriya brought with her deep experience and relationships in the field built over decades of work in both movements and philanthropy for social justice.  She also brought her own years of transformative practice, embodying in her life and work the integration we support and believe in.

 

According to Karie Brown, board chair, “Supriya helped Hidden Leaf evolve from a ‘hidden’ leaf to a bold and visible experiment in liberatory philanthropy. She guided Hidden Leaf toward stronger trust-based grantmaking; helped us invest more of our endowment in regenerative economies, center spirit more fully, and partner more actively with other funders to support transformative approaches within justice movements.” Before Supriya joined the foundation, Hidden Leaf gave $1 million in grants.  During Supriya’s tenure, the foundation saw an increase in its endowment due to careful stewardship of our assets as well as significant asset transfer from the David A. Brown Trust into Hidden Leaf.  Further, the board and staff, informed deeply by the field, embraced a trust-based approach to our giving as well as one that looked at all of the financial tools in our toolbox as a philanthropic institution.  This resulted in an increased payout of 8% for five years alongside a five-year grantmaking program that, when completed, will result in $15 million in low-barrier, long-term support to the field.  This commitment includes a game-changing integrated capital approach, which provides grants alongside non-extractive, community-led investments. We hope that our integrated approach will be catalytic in creating and sustaining change for those leading the way toward a healthier, inclusive, and equitable future.

 

During Supriya’s tenure, we have expanded our commitment to racial justice and a just transition, believing that spirit is at the center of creating a world in which people and planet can flourish. As our work evolved, we needed to be in our own practice as an organization; turning the gaze back on ourselves, we asked how we could best align and leap toward the changes needed now?  Part of our practice included democratizing our board and decision-making.  The family asked Supriya to join us as our first independent, community board member.  We then expanded on this commitment by inviting Alta Starr, a somatics practitioner, movement veteran, former funder and Director of Training with BOLD (Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity) to join us.  We intend to continue living into these principles of democracy grounded in spirit, care for people and planet, as we thoughtfully bring on broader Brown family membership, especially the next generation.

 

Supriya shares, “From the beginning, I have shared profoundly in the work of the Hidden Leaf Foundation, including the deep respect for the communities we have the privilege to serve and who fight on the frontlines of social and environmental change every day. I thank the Brown sisters, Tara, Karie and Kristen, for entrusting me to shepherd the beautiful vision they co-created with their father, Dave Brown. I am grateful to the team of Hidden Leaf–the phenomenal staff and our incredible advisors–along with the board, who work so solidly together, delivering on a big, bold vision.”  Our work will continue to deepen and evolve because of the ways in which Supriya touched it.

 

Supriya leaves us to join the Libra Foundation and Tao Rising LLC. We see this, too, as an evolution of the bigger work we are all a part of.  “Supriya brings love, delight and joy to all that she does. We will miss her dearly. We are truly excited that Supriya will be leading Libra Foundation. Colleagues from Libra have been important funding partners for Hidden Leaf, especially as we have more deeply aligned our investments with our values and as we participate in organizing philanthropic partners. We look forward to continuing this work with Supriya in her new role,” says former Executive Director and current Hidden Leaf board member, Tara Brown.

 

Because we are in the midst of a five-year grantmaking program and have done deep work to set the course for our longer-term strategy, the foundation is in a place of great stability.  We will turn to onboarding an interim leader before we embark on a search for a new Executive Director.  We thank our grantee partners, philanthropic allies and the wider ecosystem we feel so indelibly a part of for your partnership, resilience and grace.  We look forward to continuing to growing stronger with and for you.

by hiddenleaf_q04kkf