Lorelei is an institution builder, philanthropic strategist and artist with over 20 years of experience building holistic partnerships between funders and community-based organizations. She has a proven track record of designing and leading multi-million dollar grantmaking initiatives, creating social impact programs, and convening global change makers. Investing in young leaders across the African Diaspora has been a core commitment throughout her career.

Most recently, Lorelei served as Executive Director of the Warner Music Group/Blavatnik Family Foundation Social Justice Fund, a $100M initiative that invests in organizations that build more just and equitable communities. In this role, Lorelei built the Fund from its initial concept to a high-impact grantmaking institution operating across six global markets. She stewarded core investments in education, youth organizing, criminal justice reform and the arts, built an employee giving program across 16 countries, incentivized matching grants with major music industry brands, and built a thriving global community of grantee partners.

Prior to joining the SJF, Williams served as Senior Vice President of Grant Programs at Comic Relief U.S., where she managed a $52M grantmaking portfolio across 38 countries leveraging the power of entertainment to help address child poverty. At CRUS, Lorelei founded a youth-led participatory grantmaking initiative and established a new grantmaking pillar focused on economic empowerment, providing thousands of low-income youth with access to job training, job placement and investment in youth-led social enterprises.

Before Comic Relief, Williams spent more than a decade working as a philanthropic strategist with a focus on the US, Brazil and South Africa. Clients included the Kellogg Foundation, Ford Foundation, Brazil Foundation, and The Brazilian Institute of Ethnic Media, among others. As a Fulbright fellow in Brazil, Williams founded the POMPA project in partnership with the Steve Biko Institute to train afrodesdcendent youth for public service careers.

Lorelei’s writings have appeared in Essence Magazine, Studio Magazine, and Meridians Journal on Feminism, Race and Transnationalism and in the anthologies Be the Dream (Algonquin Books); Cave Canem III (Black Classic Press); Daddy Can I Tell You Something (Sela Press); and Guerreras y Cimarronas (University of Houston Arte Publico Press). Her work has been recognized through fellowships from the Breadloaf Young Writers Conference, Cave Canem and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2023, she was awarded the New York Women’s Foundation Radical Generosity Award.

A Harlem native, Lorelei holds a B.A. from Yale University in Political Science and African American Studies and a master’s degree in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She loves waterskiing, dancing samba, freestyle cyphers and traveling with her daughter.