Lorraine Ramirez

Executive Director, Funders for Justice

Lorraine serves as the executive director of Funders for Justice (FFJ), after co-founding FFJ with member leaders in September 2014. Lorraine is a queer Chicana who has worked for over twenty years in social justice philanthropy, in the areas of queer and trans liberation, racial justice, immigrant rights, gender justice, criminalization and state violence, and housing and the foreclosure crisis. She currently serves on the steering committee of the In Defense of Movements Project, and recently joined the board of Hyams Foundation.

Lorraine previously worked at Neighborhood Funders Group, managing their housing and place-based funder organizing work in its earlier formation, and then as co-founder and director of Funders for Justice while it was a program of NFG. Prior to NFG, Lorraine was part of the US Programs team at the Open Society Foundations, as a member of the Equality and Opportunity Fund. She began her work in philanthropy with five years on the grantmaking team at the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, across their international and US-based grant programs. She has trained, consulted, and partnered with a number of grassroots social justice community-based organizations across the US, in the areas of fundraising skills and strategies, organizational development, safety and security practices, and coalition-building, always in service to queer and trans BIPOC organizing to build the world we need and to end the prison industrial complex.

Lorraine has previously served on the board of JustFund.us, Kolibri Foundation, Audre Lorde Project, Queers for Economic Justice, the Justice Committee, Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training (GIFT), Trans Queer Pueblo, and Resource Generation; and as a member of the grants panel for the Mobilize Power Fund of Third Wave Fund. Lorraine holds a B.A. in Women’s Studies from Pomona College.