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Zsuzsanna Lippai

Zsuzsanna is the Executive Director of The Fuller Project, where she leads the continual deepening of the organization’s strategy work, monitors and drives execution of progress on key organizational priorities, and ensures that strategy, operations, and resources are aligned in order to maximize effectiveness. 

Zsuzsanna brings to the role her deep experience in building inclusive organizational cultures, leading organizational change, and nurturing strong relationships with internal and external partners. Focusing on women’s rights and democratic governance issues, she has spent almost 15 years successfully leading strategic planning, operations, and impact measurement functions in non-profit and philanthropic organizations of various sizes.

Zsuzsanna joins The Fuller Project after almost eight years at the Open Society Foundations, a global human rights philanthropy. While there, she initially served as a grant maker to a $1M portfolio aimed at strengthening the women’s rights ecosystem and specifically young feminist organizations. Later, she served as the director for strategy and impact for OSF’s biggest program, the Human Rights Initiative, where she led operations, strategy, evaluation, and grant making for a staff of 42. In 2021, Zsuzsanna became the acting director of OSF’s women’s rights work and in this capacity shepherded the organization’s $100M gender equality commitment. While at OSF, Zsuzsanna made critical, lasting changes to how the organization approached and implemented strategic planning and evaluation practices and led successful internal advocacy to create pioneering family planning human resources benefits for staff. 

Prior to OSF, Zsuzsanna developed an organization-wide impact measurement system and served as an advisor on designing and measuring national policies on women, peace, and security for the Institute for Inclusive Security, a foundation advancing women’s participation in peace processes and the security sector. She advised the Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Agency for Gender Equality on developing and resourcing a national policy framework, which resulted in the country’s first National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security. She co-wrote “What Matters Most: Measuring Plans for Inclusive Security”, the first guide on designing measurable policies to advance women’s participation in the security sector and implement UN Security Council Resolution 1325. 

In her previous roles, Zsuzsanna delivered creative solutions at the intersection of strategy, evaluation, and learning, conducted research on human rights in the Middle East, facilitated capacity building sessions on project design, and honed innovative evaluation methodologies such as social network analysis. Her career has included work at the National Democratic Institute, Search for Common Ground, the Middle East Institute, and nonprofits in Hungary and France. 

Zsuzsanna was a 2020 92Y Women inPower fellow and a 2021 Truman National Security Fellow. She has previously served as the Program Co-Chair of the Advocacy and Policy Change Working Group at the American Evaluation Association and a co-host to the New York Philanthropy Evaluation Roundtable. 

Zsuzsanna holds an MA in international peace and conflict resolution from American University, a BA/MA in international relations from Corvinus University in Budapest, Hungary, and spent a semester abroad at l'Institut des Sciences Politiques de Paris. She is fluent in French and Spanish in addition to her native Hungarian. She lives in Maryland with her family. 

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