KTN: Ilana Landsberg-Lewis - Grandmothers to Grandmothers Campaign

Know the Name with Sharon Lynn Wyeth

Ilana Landsberg-Lewis has spent her entire adult life engaged in the struggle for the rights of women and girls. From her early days as a human rights and labor lawyer to her years at the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), Ilana has worked with women’s groups around the world, and has learned that no amount of so-called expertise can replace that of women at the frontlines of their own struggle for justice.
Ilana has been the executive director of the Stephen Lewis Foundation since she co-founded it in 2003 – a charitable foundation that has sent over 100 million dollars (every penny raised) to sub-Saharan Africa, to community-based organizations at the frontlines of the AIDS pandemic.
She launched the Grandmothers to Grandmothers Campaign in 2006, and it has since grown into a social movement – with over 10,000+ grandmothers in Canada, Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. to support African grandmothers raising millions of orphaned grandchildren. The Grandmothers to Grandmothers Campaign has raised over $27 million dollars in the last decade, and Ilana has been deeply grateful to learn from indomitable grandmothers the world over.