Fund for Global Human Rights

The Fund for Global Human Rights is founded on the belief that securing basic freedoms worldwide requires effective, frontline organizations challenging abuse wherever it occurs. Thus the Fund for Global Human Rights works to ensure a strong, effective human rights community worldwide. Since 2002, the Fund has delivered over $13 million in new resources to human rights groups in sixteen countries.

The Fund finds and funds local human rights heroes who often work at great personal risk to strengthen and bring global attention to their struggles.

The Fund’s purpose is to support local, national, and regional human rights groups and networks abroad in becoming stronger, more effective, and better funded. To accomplish this, the Fund for Global Human Rights focuses in five regions and has identified specific regional strategies designed to make the most impact with limited funds and resources. Grants are awarded through a competitive and transparent grants process.

Our grants support campaigns that otherwise might falter for lack of resources, bring financial stability to groups, and help organizations take their work to the next level. For example, the Fund’s support has brought education, social assistance, health care and human rights training to former child soldiers in both Sierra Leone and Liberia. And, with support from the Fund, a group of Liberian human rights and environmental lawyers brought to light gross abuses by several corporations mining for timber and diamonds. In response to the outcry, these corporations have all but ceased operations in the affected areas.

Regan E. Ralph is the founding executive director of the Fund for Global Human Rights. Prior to launching the Fund, Regan was Vice President for Health and Reproductive Rights at the National Women’s Law Center in Washington D.C. where she led advocacy, policy and educational strategies to promote the quality and availability of health care for American women. From 1992-2001, Regan helped build and ultimately directed the Women’s Rights division of Human Rights Watch, where she developed campaigns to ensure the prosecution of sexual violence in conflict as a war crime, to secure recognition of gender-based persecution as grounds for asylum, and to promote women’s rights in countries including Russia, Egypt, Turkey, South Africa, Pakistan and Mexico. Regan is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, and studied international law at the London School of Economics and Arabic at the American University in Cairo. She chairs the board of the Center for Health and Gender Equity and serves on the advisory council of the Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellowship Program at Georgetown University Law Center.

Mary Robinson (Chair), President, Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative
Mary Ann Stein (Founding Chair), President, The Moriah Fund
Kemal Ahmed, Founder & Managing Partner, Old Square Capital Advisors LLC
Holly Cartner, Director, Europe and Central Asia division of Human Rights Watch
Hina Jilani, Director, AGHS Legal Aid Clinic; Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary General on Human Rights Defenders
Josh Mailman, President, Sirius Business Corporation
Chidi Anselm Odinkalu, Senior Legal Officer, Open Society Justice Initiative
Mona Younis, Director, AAAS Science and Human Rights Program
Mariclaire Acosta Urquidi, Americas Director, International Center for Transitional Justice
George Biddle, Senior Vice President, The International Rescue Committee
Cynthia Ryan, Executive Director, The Schooner Foundation
Helen Mack, Founder, The Myrna Mack Foundation

Pakistan, India, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Congo, the Democratic Republic of the, Uganda, Mexico, Guatemala, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Colombia, Burundi, Philippines, Thailand

District of Columbia

1666 Connecticut Avenue NW
Suite 410
Washington, DC 20009
Phone: (202) 347-7488
www.globalhumanrights.org
EIN: 75-3029336