Tania Durán (she/her) manages relationships and grant portfolios in parts of the Foundation’s 11-state footprint. She brings decades of experience in everything from grassroots organizing to policy advocacy, capacity building, coalition building, leadership development and social justice philanthropy. She has been actively involved in cross-movement networks on racial justice, democracy, reproductive justice, economic justice and alternative economic models, climate justice, and language justice in the United States and her home country of El Salvador.
Tania comes to MRBF from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, where she served as a senior program officer co-leading the state-level systemic change strategy. As part of the SLSC work, Tania developed and implemented strategies for the “promoting social and economic justice” portfolio. She also built relationships with applicants and grantee partners, closed access gaps to resources, power and infrastructure, and strengthened grassroots BIPOC infrastructure. Tania co-led the Foundation’s racial and gender equity work, deepening a collective equity lens and developing mechanisms to operationalize this lens. Tania led strategy alignment and leveraging efforts with philanthropic partners through her work in funder collaboratives.
Before joining ZSR, Tania was the North Carolina Program Manager for Hispanics in Philanthropy and coordinated the NC Funders’ Collaborative for Strong Latino Communities – a network of funders building the capacity of Latinx-led organizations and infrastructure. Previously, Tania worked as the Director of Youth Programs at El Pueblo, where she helped develop youth leadership, engage youth in effective community organizing, and build leaders’ capacity to engage in intergenerational work. Previously, Tania worked with NC WARN as a community organizer on environmental, energy and climate justice issues. She has a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering from Universidad Centroamericana “Jose Simeon Cañas” in San Salvador, and a Master in Politics of Alternative Development, with a focused on decolonial approaches and movement building, from the International Institute of Social Studies Erasmus at the University Rotterdam in The Hague, Netherlands. She also has an international certificate in popular education methodologies. In her spare time, Tania enjoys spending time with her family, traveling and dancing.
