In 2005, Supriya Lopez Pillai returned to the United States after a spell abroad that had taken her from rural West Africa to the bustling streets of Phnom Penh. She had a new mission: to understand and influence philanthropy — and ultimately move more resources to front-line communities.
“I have come to believe in the possibility of organizing philanthropy, closing the gap between those with wealth and those most impacted by inequity who are transforming our world for the better,” she later wrote about her early lessons in the sector.
Her next step in that journey will be as the president of the Libra Foundation, the social justice grantmaker announced Monday, marking a new chapter at the influential progressive philanthropy, founded by Nicholas and Susan Pritzker and their children.
She succeeds Crystal Hayling, who has been a prominent and eloquent advocate for philanthropy to fight harder for racial justice and against climate change and antidemocratic forces, including as a frequent contributor to the field’s op-ed pages.
Lopez Pillai comes to the role from the Hidden Leaf Foundation, where she spent six years as executive director. The $54 million, San Francisco-based progressive grantmaker funds some of the same grantees and works in similar circles as Libra. In her time there, the foundation increased its payout to 8% annually and overhauled its investment approach.
Earlier, she founded her own consulting firm, Vision & Ink, which worked with funders like the California Endowment, Hyams Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation and W.K. Kellogg Foundation, as well as regranting projects like Mama Cash’s Fund for Women and the Seasons Fund for Social Transformation, among other clients.
Her resume also includes stints as the executive director of the Funders’ Collaborative on Youth Organizing and program officer for Asia at the International Health Coalition.
Lopez Pillai was born and raised in Chicago to parents who immigrated to the United States from the Indian state of Kerala. “My family’s history informs a lot of who I am,” she once wrote.
Here’s six other things to know about Lopez Pillai, who begins her new role in September.
She’s got deep roots in the progressive philanthrosphere
Lopez Pillai has close links to institutions across social justice philanthropy. She’s been part of the Solidaire Network, she’s served on the boards of the Global Fund for Women and the Third Wave Fund, she’s been a featured speaker for the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, and she cowrote a report on youth organizing, “Generation Transformation,” for the Ford Foundation.
She was also among the signatories, along with Hayling and dozens of others, of a 2021 open letter organized by the Groundswell Fund, which called for white donors and white-led institutions who were moving funding for racial justice to give flexible, long-term grants to movement-accountable, people-of-color-led foundations. Lopez Pillai’s social justice connections go beyond philanthropy. She was also a fellow at the Movement Strategy Center, and she serves on the Research Review Board of the All Due Respect Project, a community organizers’ labor standards group.
She has pushed for transforming endowments
Count Lopez Pillai among a growing number of grantmakers calling for a transformation of foundation investments to ensure philanthropic assets do not create the harms that grants seek to address.
“Our concentrations of wealth and power, and the ways our endowments have been traditionally invested, have been at the expense of those who today are on the front lines of the climate crisis: Indigenous, Black, working class and people of color communities,” she has written.
She has taken part in transforming how a foundation invests firsthand. Before she left Hidden Leaf, the foundation updated its Investment Policy Statement, in a process led by board member and donor family member Tara Brown. “We hope this progressive IPS will be useful to other institutions like us,” she wrote.
She has big shoes to fill
Crystal Hayling, who came to Libra in 2017 and retired earlier this year, has been an outsized force in philanthropy, exerting an influence on the field beyond what might be expected given Libra’s grantmaking budget.
One favorite tool has been the pen. Over the years, Hayling has written op-eds for Stanford Social Innovation Review, Chronicle of Philanthropy and, yes, Inside Philanthropy.
IP, admittedly, has been a fan. We named her 2021 Foundation Leader of the Year and included her on our inaugural IP Power List in 2021 and on our roundup of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Philanthropy in 2023.
She knows her way around the op-ed pages
Like her predecessor, Lopez Pillai can wield a pen. In 2008, she wrote an article for The Nation about keeping young people engaged in politics following the historic election of former President Barack Obama — and already had an eye on where the money was going.
She urged readers to “invest in youth organizing, not just for the next election cycle, but for the long term, with the aim of cultivating a new generation of progressive civic leaders.”
Lopez Pillai was also an editor at Stress Magazine, which covered hip hop and sociopolitical issues, and has written for the journal Gender and Development.
Last March, she wrote an op-ed for IP, “For Real Climate Justice, Philanthropy Must Support the Front Lines, Fund Early and Fund Big,” pushing not only for bolder investments, but for urgency.
“We know it’s smarter to invest big now rather than down the road, when the resources it will take to reach real solutions may be out of reach, the sacrifices too great, and worse yet, the time not enough,” she said.
She also writes fiction and poetry
Opinion is not Lopez Pillai’s only format. Her creative work has been published in outlets like Dillydoun Review and Sky Island Journal, which nominated her in 2021 for a Pushcart Prize. Some of her poems were also included in the installation “Art in the Time of COVID” at the Raspberry Neon Art House in Sebastopol, California.
“I am the kind of writer that can’t help herself and must write to feel totally alive,” she once wrote. Want to read one of her works? “How to Make Victory Tea,” a piece of flash fiction, is available online from The Margins, the digital magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
She speaks five languages
Lopez Pillai is also fluent in French, conversational in Malayalam — which is spoken in her parents’ home state of Kerala — and Khmer, and familiar with Hindi, according to her resume.
