Meredith Stricker is Executive Director of The Soufan Center. She has over ten years of experience in the human rights, peace and security and development sectors, working on gender policy, anti-poverty programs and efforts to reduce violence in the United States, East and West Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. As the Program Director of the Peace and Security Funders Group (PSFG), based in Washington D.C., Ms. Stricker worked with a network of foundations and philanthropists that make grants of over $350 million in annual giving in the peace and security sector, and took a leadership role in general relationship building with both partners in government and the practitioner communities. She also led the PSFG’s Working Groups on Preventing Violence (focused on so-called “countering violent extremism” efforts) and Gender and Conflict.

Before joining PSFG, Ms. Stricker was the Executive Director of the Zameer Foundation, a small private family foundation that focused on innovative educational opportunities, resource mobilization, and sanitation services for orphans and vulnerable children in four states in India. Previous to her work in India, Ms. Stricker served as Country Director for Transitions, an anti-sex trafficking organization based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where she advocated on behalf of survivors and ran a school and shelter for teenage girls. She has also worked in Senegal on women’s economic empowerment projects, in Uganda on women’s property rights initiatives, and in Rwanda with non-profits focused on health care and social entrepreneurship. An Honors College scholar, Ms. Stricker has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a Master in International Affairs from Columbia University, where she earned the Dr. Susan Aurelia Gitelson Award for Human Values in International Affairs.