Celebrating Heather Ibrahim-Leathers, Recipient of the 2023 Crain’s New York Business Notable Nonprofit Board Leaders award.
ABANA is proud to celebrate our Board Member, Heather Ibrahim-Leathers, Founder and President of Global Funds for Widows, for being selected as a recipient of the 2023 Crain’s New York Business Notable Nonprofit Board Leaders Award.
Ms. Ibrahim-Leathers is a well-accomplished social entrepreneur, Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and advocate for the rights of widows and child widows at the United Nations. Prior to her career in non-profit, Ms. Ibrahim-Leathers served as a Vice President, in Credit Suisse’s Leveraged Investment Group, where she was directly responsible for over $1 billion in high-yield and leveraged loan assets.
As founder of Global Funds for Widows, she has helped more than 100,000 widows to become economically empowered and self-sustained. Founded in 2009, GFW has raised well over $5,000,000 for economic empowerment programs in Egypt, India, Tanzania, Nigeria, Bolivia, and the Dominican Republic.
“I think that everything that we’ve done so far has come out of these small moments of obligation that are also small moments of realizing failure, whether it was my own failure or somebody else’s failure. Those moments of obligations are really the big triggers.”
