Meet Chantal Hildebrand, AFG’s New Co-Executive Director
Meet our new Co-Executive Director, Chantal Hildebrand. Advancing gender equity and justice internationally and here in California has been her life’s work. Chantal joined AFG nearly three years ago as Director of Programs. The following year, she was promoted as AFG’s Deputy Director.
Throughout her nearly two decades of work, she helped train and supported over 100 local leaders and their organizations in advocacy, resulting in the improvement and passage of over 20 policies, implementation guidelines, and budgets addressing issues of gender inequity in Kenya, Nigeria, Malawi, South Africa, and California.
Chantal’s lived and professional experiences have shaped her as a leader.
✨Chantal has lived in many cities across the African continent and in the US. She has a strong cultural connection to her mother’s Kenyan roots and travels there as often as possible.
✨Chantal moved from Kenya to the US when she was 13 years old and attended high school and college in the US, deepening her interest in gender and racial equity.
✨She later earned her Masters degrees from the University of California, Berkeley in Public Health and City Planning.
✨Chantal brings a wealth of experience working for highly reputable organizations like Slum Dwellers International (SDI) and Rise Up, where she honed her skills in community-led advocacy and alliance building across the globe.
✨Chantal has a passion for research. She has collaborated on international gender-equity research projects, as well as research on equitable access to higher education for African-American students in Oakland and assessing stigma against people experiencing homelessness through U.S tweets.
✨Chantal loves sharing her knowledge with others and has been a graduate student instructor and has served as a guest speaker to the next generation of graduate students UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health.
✨Chantal continues to advocate for equity across the globe serving as a working group member of the Racial Equity Index, a global collective of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) dedicated to holding the global development sector accountable to dismantling all forms of systemic racism.
We are fortunate to have Chantal serve as AFG’s new Co-Executive Director. We look forward to her leadership working alongside Linda in this new phase of AFG’s work.
“I’m honored and excited to lead the AFG team alongside Linda into this next wave of the organization’s future. As AFG’s first Black Co-Executive Director, I look forward to tapping into my own experiences, coupled with my professional skill sets, to push the needle towards a more equitable future where girls and gender-expansive youth, especially those of color, can truly thrive. I feel lucky to work alongside such powerful leaders in the gender equity space as we create platforms for girls and gender-expansive youth to share their stories and shift the narratives, systems, policy, and environments to ones that they themselves want to see.”
