Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz
Director of Capacity Building

Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz is the director of capacity building for the Task Force, where she works in partnership with grassroots LGBT organizations, collectives and community groups to strengthen their infrastructure, long-term effectiveness and sustainability. She has extensive expertise in the areas of organizational development, board development, coaching and strategic planning — all of which she uses for the expressed purpose of strengthening social justice organizations.

In conjunction with her organization-building expertise, Weiner-Mahfuz has worked in several movements for social justice with a particular emphasis on building grassroots political power across movements, issues, identities and communities. As a movement builder, cultural worker and writer Weiner-Mahfuz has dedicated much of her organizing life to challenging oppression at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability.

Weiner-Mahfuz’s writings can be found in Colonize This! Young Women of Color and Feminism (Seal Press, 2002), Fireweed Magazine's “Mixed Race Issue” (Issue 75), and through on a Web-based project titled BustingBinaries, which she co-authors with Ana Maurine Lara.

Prior to joining the staff of the Task Force, she was the senior field organizer for lesbian rights for the National Organization for Women, the pension plan organizer for the National Organizers Alliance, and Midwest regional organizer for the national office of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.

Weiner-Mahfuz is a graduate of Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., where she majored in women’s studies and political science, and minored in anthropology. She currently lives in Silver Spring, Md., with partner Lisbeth Melendez Rivera.