Mariam Gagoshashvili
Program Officer, Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice
Mariam Gagoshashvili (she/they) is a program officer on Ford’s Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice team. She is a gender justice grantmaker, activist, and consultant with 17 years of experience in strategically resourcing women’s and LGBTQI movements through participatory and trust-based grantmaking approaches using an intersectional justice lens.
Through roles ranging from program officer to program director in transnational and local feminist funds, Mariam has worked to ensure that intersectional justice movements led by women and LGBTQI people, especially those affected by multiple forms of oppression, have access to long-term and flexible core funding to realize their visions of liberation. Before joining the Ford Foundation, Mariam held various positions at Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, Global Fund for Women, and Women’s Fund in Georgia. In their most recent role as international fund director at Astraea, Mariam oversaw the fund’s grantmaking, accompaniment, research, and philanthropic advocacy efforts in the Global Majority countries, specifically focusing on strengthening LBQT-led organizing.
As an independent consultant, Mariam has supported various philanthropic and adjacent initiatives in their efforts around partner convening, strategy development, futures thinking, and visioning. Among these are Feminist Dream Space, Human Rights Funders Network (HRFN), Open Society Foundations. Additionally, Mariam has lent their expertise to various organizations around strategy, governance, programming, and grantmaking in an advisory capacity. Mariam has served on the Board of Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism and is among the founding advisors of FRIDA | The Young Feminist Fund and the Dalan Fund. Before relocating to the US in 2013, Mariam co-founded a queer feminist collective, the Independent Group of Feminists, in their home country of Georgia (South Caucasus) and they remain connected and involved in various local and regional grassroots efforts around human rights and civic activism.
Mariam holds a bachelor’s degree in social psychology from Tbilisi State University, Georgia and a master’s in gender studies from Central European University, Hungary.