Ruby Johnson
Ruby has over 15 years experience advancing gender justice and human rights with grassroots groups, feminist organisations, womens’ funds, foundations, NGOs, and UN agencies with a focus on women, girls, trans and non binary people. She collaborates with organisations to build strategies and funding approaches and design programs in participatory and creative ways, working to align practice and values at an organisational level.
Her strength is in connecting people and ideas and reimagining bold and creative ways of doing things and bringing them to fruition.. Ruby is fiercely committed to redistributing resources and power to movements, in particular centring girls and young feminists in all she does. She brings direct expertise in participatory approaches to leadership and designing participatory grant making models. Having co-designed models including: FRIDA | The Young Feminist Fund, Equality Fund and With and For Girls Fund. She has been a part of the emergence of the Participatory Grantmaking Community of Practice. She brings experience of feminist co-leadership and placing wellbeing at the centre of organisations, with specific experience in leading virtual teams.
Between 2013-2019 Ruby was the Co-Executive Director of FRIDA | The Young Feminist Fund and with Devi, where she played a critical role in strengthening the Fund, from being the only staff member to growing the team to 20, expanding the budget from 250,000 to over 4 million USD and building a grantee community of 150 young feminist groups. She played a critical role in seeding feminist organizational culture, systems and structures, co-creating the Happiness Manifestx and setting up core systems. Ruby had a key part in thought leadership, advocacy and research, contributing to the organisation becoming a well known player in the feminist funding ecosystem, and co-leading a number of flagship publications including Girls to the Front and Brave, Creative and Resilience: the state of young feminist organising.
Prior to joining FRIDA, Ruby had a range of roles; UN Women in Cambodia on governance and women’s human rights, Amnesty International in Australia and Mexico, and leading programs in Cambodia and Palestine mainstreaming gender into the eye health sector at the Fred Hollows Foundation. She has accompanied women human rights and environmental defenders and young feminist collectives in Mexico, Cambodia and Australia.
In 2020 Ruby kicked off a consulting practice and continues to work with feminist funds and organisations including Equality Fund, With and For Girls / Purposeful, Numun, Global Fund for Women, and UN Women. She has a key role in knowledge building and storytelling initiatives including Where is the Money for Girls Rights’ and Girls Resistance Stories. Ruby is currently co-leading the Global Resilience Fund - a pop up fund housed at Purposeful, made up of 27 funders across the funding ecosystem.
Ruby is a board member of the Australia entity of Women's Fund Asia, a member of the Social Investment Committee for Comic Relief and an Advisor on Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence project. She is based between Oaxaca, Mexico and Sydney, Australia.
✦ www.rubyamelia.com
