Centering Community & Building Power: MADRE’s Executive Director Yifat Susskind Reflects on 30 Years at MADRE

Over nearly three decades, Yifat grew MADRE from a small but ambitious organization into a globally respected voice for feminist, locally led movements.

In this retrospective conversation, she reflects on the moments that shaped both her leadership and MADRE’s evolution, from responding to 9/11 and advancing international justice efforts to navigating the current collapse of global aid systems. Throughout it all, Yifat returns to a belief that has long grounded MADRE’s work, which is that local organizing, collective care, and grassroots women’s leadership will always remain the foundation for lasting change.

Over the last 30 years, MADRE has grown from a small, regionally focused organization into an intersectional and multifaceted international organization. Can you talk about the evolution of MADRE from then to now?

One of the biggest shifts we made over the years at MADRE was driven by the realization that many of the crises our partners were working to address at the local level, such as wars, environmental destruction, and unjust economic policies, originated in centers of power far from their communities. Working only at the local level felt to them like pushing a rock up a hill just for it to tumble back down.

This fundamentally changed how we approached the work. Alongside humanitarian partnership and local organizing, we resolved to create access for grassroots women leaders to the spaces where these decisions were being made and shape those systems directly, rather than remain trapped in a cycle of responding to the consequences.

One of the clearest examples of that was our work in Colombia, which for decades was home to one of the world’s most intractable armed conflicts and the largest population of internally displaced people in the world.

Much of the violence and displacement was concentrated in Black and Indigenous territories. Including Black and Indigenous women in the peace process was not a given, but we succeeded in ensuring that our partners from those communities had a seat at the negotiating table and, importantly, a role in shaping how the peace accords were ultimately implemented in their communities.

MADRE eventually became the only international organization with a formal agreement to train prosecutors, lawyers, and judges in Colombia’s transitional justice process using our signature anti-racist, feminist approach to peacebuilding.

What was a defining turning point in your work at MADRE? What did that moment teach you?

9/11 was the first moment when I fully understood MADRE’s ability to articulate a political vision of the kind of world we are working to build, even in a context of fear, violence, and backlash.

The US reaction to 9/11 centered on vengeance and militarization. Yet even with MADRE headquartered in New York, so close to the atrocity itself, we chose to respond differently by immediately launching a campaign called Justice, Not Vengeance.

For me, that response felt especially personal. Before joining MADRE, I had worked in Palestine on human rights issues. Ziad, a friend and dear colleague from that time, arrived in New York for a visit on September 10, 2001. After MADRE launched Justice, Not Vengeance, he and I went on a speaking tour together across the country, discussing what a just response to 9/11 could look like.

My son was only six months old at the time, and Ziad and I would take turns caring for the baby while we were on the road. It really embodied MADRE’s belief that solidarity and care are inseparable from justice work.

That experience ultimately shaped much of how I think about security and care, which later became central to my TED Talk, Think Like a Mother, where I talk about how real security comes from protecting human life, not domination or violence.

You’ve often spoken about feminist leadership as deeply collective. Who helped shape your understanding of what that leadership could look like?

I’m thinking of a beloved longtime partner and friend who passed away last year, Rose Cunningham. She was a Miskito Indigenous leader, educator, and women’s rights activist from Nicaragua.

Rose embodied an ethic of leadership that enabled everybody in the community to act in their fullest capacity. Her leadership was really never about her. In many of the photos we have of Rose, she’s standing with a large group of people, and she’s never at the front or center, as we often conceive of leadership in the United States.

To me, that represented the values she brought to leadership. It was really about using whatever resources and capacities she had to lift up others and ensure the whole community benefited from everything she did.

We’re living through a moment where many global institutions and aid systems are under strain, being systematically dismantled and collapsing. How do we continue building power and caring for communities through this time?

What we’ve seen happen with institutions like USAID is devastating. These systems were always deeply flawed, but dismantling them so abruptly and recklessly left no time to build alternatives. The consequences have been needless death and suffering.

But what this moment also reveals is the core work women have always done. When systems fail and fall apart, what remains are the women who have always been there, caring for their communities in times of need. We’re seeing this today, as women in communities hard-hit by aid cuts join together to fight for their futures and their children’s futures by meeting urgent needs.

I was recently speaking with a colleague working on maternal health in East Africa, where many clinics were forced to close due to USAID cuts. As soon as that happened, women began organizing networks of local midwives, providing them with additional training and supplies from shuttered clinics.

Initiatives like this are happening in communities worldwide right now. They are not a replacement for publicly-funded resources, infrastructure, medicine, and equitable healthcare systems, but what gives me hope is that people are not sitting around helplessly while these systems fail. They’re organizing.

Women have always found ways to innovate and respond to the needs of their communities. Our responsibility – and MADRE’s core work – is to continue investing in their leadership and systems of care while fighting to hold governments accountable for upholding basic human rights, including access to healthcare.

As you prepare to leave MADRE during a moment marked by growing backlash and repression around the world, what still gives you hope?

What gives me hope is seeing people fundamentally change how they understand one another’s struggles. I think about MADRE’s work in Iraq, where feminist organizers came to understand LGBTQ+ liberation not as something separate from their work, but as deeply connected to their own struggle for justice.

Once people are transformed in their understanding, that change is permanent. No amount of repression can undo that or take it away.

When opportunities for larger change come again, we’ll be ready to build and mobilize at a much greater scale.

After an extraordinary tenure organizing, advocating, and developing tools and services for communities around the world, what’s a principle that helped guide your work at MADRE?

The throughline in all my years at MADRE is that there is no greater power than women, rooted in communities, coming together to overcome isolation and discrimination and to organize with an ethic of care for themselves and their communities.

One reason I am so confident and gratified to see Delisha and Lauren step up to lead MADRE is that they understand this principle deeply. I look forward to building on MADRE’s work with them in my role as President Emerita, and investing in the women and communities who have always sustained movements through crisis and change.