Click here to access Lisa VeneKlasen's Oral History audio files.

Additionally, you can click here to access the accompanying time-coded summary of the interview. Full transcripts and other oral history materials are available at the British Library Sound Archive, London, United Kingdom, and at the WLP office in Bethesda, MD. For more information, please consult our Oral History Archive of the Global Women’s Movement Terms of Use. 

About the Interviewee* 

Lisa VeneKlasen (USA) is founder of Just Associates (JASS) building women’s collective power for justice. The organization equips and accompanies women leaders from all walks of life, and helps bring diverse activists, organizations and networks together to identify critical injustices and act collectively to solve them. VeneKlasen has been an activist, educator, strategist and organization-builder for over 30 years, with a variety of social justice and women’s rights efforts worldwide, and has advised and trained with numerous international development and human rights organizations.

Trained as a community organizer, VeneKlasen’s student activism in the early 1980s introduced her to popular educators and movement leaders in Latin America and the US, and led her to Nicaragua where she worked for two years with the Sandinista government's renowned adult literacy program. In pursuit of more direct US policy influence, she co-led 30 fact-finding missions of opinion leaders to Central America, was an organizer with the national Central America Peace Campaign, and served as Legislative Aid for a US Congressional Representative. VeneKlasen has worked with women’s rights and development organizations in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe. With Women, Law and Development International for over five years, she relocated to Zimbabwe to design and coordinate a 10-country training and networking project that led to the creation of the pan-African Women in Law and Development in Africa (WiLDAF), and worked closely with women’s groups in Africa and Eastern Europe to prepare for the UN Women’s Conference in Beijing in 1995.

From 1997-2001, she was the Assistant Director of the Global Women in Politics program of the Asia Foundation, where she ran a multi-regional advocacy training and political leadership project. She serves on the Reference Group for the International Budget Partnership, on the board of the Bank Information Center, and as an advisor to the Nobel Women’s Initiative. She graduated from Smith College, and has a Masters in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

*This brief biography was recorded concurrently with the subject’s interview for the WLP Oral History Archive of the Global Women’s Movement.

About the WLP Oral History Project

The WLP Oral History Archive of the Global Women’s Movement preserves stories and lessons of women’s rights activists from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America who have left their mark on the struggle for women’s advancement. We have collected dozens of oral histories from 25 countries, and the project is ongoing. Since 2014, WLP has collaborated with the Sound Archive of the British Library to host the repository.

Read more ABOUT OUR ORAL HISTORY PROJECT.

Read our Oral History Archive of the Global Women’s Movement Terms of Use.