Zahra Vieneuve is a transnational feminist advocate, philanthropic adviser, grantmaker, and resource mobilizer with over 17 years of extensive work on issues of gender, racial, and climate justice and human rights across the world. She is the Senior Director of Development at Marin Community Foundation (MCF). Prior to her joining MCF, Zahra was at Global Fund for Women for 10 years in various roles including as the Vice President of Global Partnerships and Program Director for Freedom from Violence. She oversaw strategic partnerships, philanthropic collaborations, and global movements support across all of Global Fund for Women’s priority regions.
Prior to her work at Global Fund for Women, Zahra’s work has focused on women human rights in the Middle East and North Africa. In her capacity as Senior Program Officer at Karama, an international organization focused on combatting violence against women in the MENA region, she worked very closely with women human rights activists involved in the women, peace and security agenda, especially in Libya, Palestine, Iraq, and Yemen. She also coordinated Karama’s GBV work in Egypt through partnerships with local women human rights groups. At the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies in Egypt, she led the human rights education program where she designed and held human rights and peace education training targeting Middle Eastern youth in universities and civil society organizations.
Zahra is a passionate architect of dynamic resource mobilization strategies and partnerships, a creative facilitator of trust-based and authentic processes and relationships, and a gifted storyteller and communicator who is committed to finding bold and powerful ways to spread the word about social justice movements. As a philanthropic adviser and leader, she has extensive experience in establishing and nurturing dynamic, equitable, and high-impact partnerships to mobilize more and better resources for historically marginalized and underserved communities.
She holds two Master’s degrees; the first in Political Science from the University of Geneva and the second in International and Comparative Education from the American University in Cairo. Zahra is fluent in English, French, and Arabic.
