Our team

Country: United States

What is one thing you can’t live without? Community and collective care.

Heather Benjamin is the founding executive director of Nebula Fund. She is a queer feminist activist with a background that bridges philanthropy, global policy advocacy, and grassroots activism. Prior to launching Nebula, Heather spent the last decade with Open Society Foundations Public Health Program, where she served as a Senior Program Officer focused on global HIV financing, sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice (SRHRJ), and health governance issues. Her grantmaking and advocacy work has focused on supporting activists to respond to transnational anti-gender movements and harmful aid conditionalities impacting SRHRJ, LGBTQI rights, sex worker rights, and rights-based HIV treatment and prevention, efforts to center communities as decision-makers on funding and policy issues that impact their lives, and advocacy to increase the availability and quality of funding for health, human rights, and gender justice.

She has served as a member of the International Steering Committee of the Red Umbrella Fund, a sex worker-led participatory fund that supports the rights of sex workers globally, and on the Private Foundations Delegation to the Board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria.

Prior to joining Open Society, Heather served as the program director of a grassroots organization dedicated to preventing and reducing the impact of gender-based violence through community mobilization, youth organizing, arts and culture production, and social norms change work. Previously Heather worked in domestic violence crisis intervention. Heather got her start as a youth activist focused on LGBTQI rights and sexual violence prevention and has a background in performing arts.