Donna Red Wing serves as Executive Director of Grassroots Leadership, a team of organizers who help community, labor, faith and campus organizations think critically, work strategically and take direct action to end social and economic oppression, gain power, and achieve justice and equity.

Grassroots Leadership's goal is to put an end to abuses of justice and the public trust by working to abolish for-profit private prisons. Red Wing previously served as Chief of Staff at Interfaith Alliance, Walter Cronkite’s organization in Washington DC. She was one of three members of the Obama’s kitchen cabinet on LGBT concerns and was Howard Dean’s outreach liaison to the LGBT communities. Red Wing has also held leadership positions at the Gill Foundation, Human Rights Campaign and the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. While directing the Lesbian Community Project, Red Wing was featured in a Sundance Award-winning film about the 1992 struggle against the radical right and their Ballot Measure 9.

Red Wing was the first recipient of the Walter Cronkite Award for Faith & Freedom. In contrast, during the Dean campaign she was named by the Christian Coalition as “the most dangerous woman in America.” Red Wing serves on the national board of the Velvet Foundation, which is building the national LGBT museum in Washington, DC.

Red Wing lives in the mountains of Colorado with Sumitra, her partner of more than twenty-five years and their dogs Doc Watson (a wire-haired dachshund) and Cinnamon (a golden, Chow Australian mix). She spends a great deal of time in Charlotte, North Carolina where Grassroots Leadership is headquartered.

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