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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.