UPDATE, January 17, 2025: Image has been updated. We apologize for our previous image selection and its lack of sensitivity to Oriaku Njoku.
The board of directors of the National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF) has opted not to renew executive director Oriaku Njoku’s contract, according to an email sent to NNAF member funds on January 15. Her term will end on February 6.
NNAF will be headed by its former chief of staff, Poonam Dreyfus-Pai, who will serve as interim executive director while the board searches for new leadership.
“During Oriaku’s tenure as Executive Director, NNAF faced critical challenges including Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization The Supreme Court decision, the voluntary recognition of our staff bargaining unit and the negotiation of our first union contract,” the email said.
The email touted Njoku’s experience as co-founder and former leader of Access Reproductive Care Southeast (ARC-Southeast).
“Her contribution laid a strong foundation for the next era of our work,” he continued. “We are deeply grateful for her dedication and wish her the best in her future endeavors.”
NNAF Communications Director Olivia Martinez declined to comment further on the reasons behind the decision, but said the agency plans to complete an ongoing strategic planning process before hiring new leadership. NNAF does not expect to have a new executive director until early 2026, according to Martinez.
Abortion fund leaders praised Njoku’s leadership in the abortion funding movement.
“I have had the pleasure of working with Oriaku for the past eight years,” Megan Jefo, executive director of the Chicago Abortion Fund, said in an emailed statement to Rewire News Group. “We met in her capacity as Executive Director of ARC-Southeast and served together on NNAF’s Operation Scale Up (OSU) Planning Team. Oriaku led NNAF through a difficult chapter.” OSU helped a pilot group of five abortion funds in the Carolinas and the Washington, DC area develop and build internal capacity.
Jeyifo said she particularly valued Njoku’s experience as co-founder of ARC-Southeast, which serves Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee. During Njoku’s tenure at ARCstaff increased from one full-time member—Dzoku—to 12;
“The network transitions will not affect CAF’s ability to continue to support abortion seekers nationally, and we imagine this is similar for most funds, which operate as stand-alone organisations,” Jeyifo said.
Martinez emphasized Dreyfus-Pai’s qualifications to lead the agency in the interim.
“Poonam has been an active member of the abortion fund since 2013,” Martinez said, noting that Dreyfus-Pai was previously deputy director of the All-Options Hoosier Abortion Fund. “Poonam has personally met with every NNAF staff member and also plans to meet with every abortion fund in the next 60 days to hear what they need in this transition and what they need in an incoming executive director in this next chapter for NNAF .”
abortion fund leaders said RNG that the announcement of Njoku’s departure came after a series of focus groups held at NNAF with member chapters, which Martinez confirmed happened as part of the organization’s strategic planning process. But board members of several abortion funds said they were caught off guard by the announcement.
“Internally, funds are putting more pressure on NNAF for more transparency, faster distribution of donations, more representation of funds within the organization and a clearer definition of why NNAF really exists,” an abortion fund leader who spoke to RNG he said on condition of anonymity.
The unnamed fund leader criticized NNAF for investing in the development of its staff instead of “directly pumping money back into funds that provide immediate service” after Dobbs.
These concerns echo those raised by RNG this summer, when major funding cuts to financial assistance for abortion procedures by the National Abortion Federation (NAF) and Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) left abortion funds scrambling to fill huge gaps during a already a difficult year reduction in funding.
While the abortion fund staff and volunteers who spoke to RNG in August were mainly critical of NAF and PPFA, several also criticized NNAF for failing to disburse money to local abortion funds quickly and efficiently enough. They also questioned whether the consolidation of power and money in national organizations would ever be an effective model.
Then, said Njoku RNG that the crisis – and the biggest crisis of a meta-Dobbs America—”called us to really rethink the ways we can move money,” adding that the details were “still under discussion.”
NNAF it was was founded on in 1993 by a group of 22 independent abortion funds, and today has almost 100 member funds. The agency confirmed it now has 89 staff, a significant increase on the years before the Supreme Court Dobbs decision. The anonymous funder noted that NNAF currently has just three board members, which the organization confirmed. NNAF’s most recent financial filing lists 14 board members, with four serving terms that expire in 2022 or early 2023.
of NNAF budget has also ballooned since then Dobbs: In the fiscal year ending summer 2021, the organization’s total revenue was about $13.5 million. In 2022, it was $53.8 million, a number that dropped to just over $49 million in 2023.
However, in 2023, NNAF disbursed only about $18 million in grants and ended the year with nearly $58 million in net assets. Some of those assets could be multi-year grants or earmarked money — NNAF reported about $17 million of its assets as having such donor restrictions. However, that leaves $40.7 million in unrestricted reported assets.
NNAF receives large grants from major foundations and high-dollar individual donors, a level of philanthropy that few individual funds have been able to leverage. While some large funds, such as CAF, have been able to scale up and hire staff, according to a 2022 NNAF reportalmost half of the funds remain purely voluntary enterprises.
The unnamed head of the fund said that, in their view, the issue was that Njoku had the right priorities but was unable to effectively push back against institutional inertia.
Njoku “may have been the head of the organisation, but he was not the neck”, the financier said. “I don’t know which person or people exactly are making up the neck, but it’s certainly not someone with recent cashier experience.”
Njoku did not respond to a request for comment.
UPDATE, January 16, 2025: This article has been updated to include the name of the representative of the National Network of Abortion Funds.
