The Collective Future Fund is excited to welcome Aleyamma Mathew as Executive Director. Since April 2019, she served as Interim Director of the Fund, bringing collaborative leadership and strategic systems-building to the start-up and planning phase. After completing this instrumental work, the founding partners named Aleyamma as permanent director, and are thrilled to have the benefit of her expertise, creativity, and deep relationships to move philanthropic resources in alignment with a vision of a future where all girls and women can live, learn and work with safety and dignity.
Aleyamma Mathew is a nationally known expert on the intersection of gender and economic justice. With over 20 years of experience in the philanthropic and advocacy sectors at the local, state, and national levels, she has led advocacy, grantmaking, capacity-building, and campaigns for economic policies to protect women’s rights, safety, and economic security, with a focus on women of color, immigrant and refugee women, and low-wage women workers.
Most recently, Aleyamma served as the Director of the Women’s Economic Justice Program at the Ms. Foundation. There she led investment strategies for ensuring women’s economic security, including through advocacy and organizing for improved wages, workplace policies, and childcare access for women, focusing on low-wage workers of color and immigrant workers.
Prior to joining the Ms. Foundation, Aleyamma was the Policy Director at the Partnership for Working Families, where she led multi-city campaigns focused on job quality, environmental protections, and equal access to public resources for low-income communities. Aleyamma also worked as the Program Director for the Women’s Institute for Leadership and Development for Human Rights where she trained grassroots organizations on assessing local policies using a human rights framework, and participated in the U.N. CERD Review Process in Geneva to highlight human rights violations against women of color in the United States. Aleyamma was part of the Founding Steering Committee and served as the Program Director for the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development, where she developed research and policy initiatives and a technical assistance program for community based agencies serving low-income Asian, Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian, refugee, and immigrant communities.
Aleyamma received her M.A. from the New School for Social Research in New York City and her B.A. from Temple University. Aleyamma lives in Brooklyn, New York.
