Vivian Stromberg

Vivian Stromberg is the Executive Director and a founding Board Member of MADRE, an international women’s human rights organization. MADRE works in partnership with community-based women’s organizations worldwide to address issues of health and reproductive rights, economic development, education, and other human rights. MADRE provides resources, training, and support to enable their partner organizations to meet concrete needs in their communities while working to shift the balance of power to promote long-term development and social justice. Since it’s founding in 1983, MADRE has delivered over 22 million dollars worth of support to community-based women’s organizations in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, the Balkans, and the United States.

Ms. Stromberg came of age in Brooklyn, New York during the Civil Rights Movement and played a key role in US-based organizing for nuclear disarmament, peace, and human rights-based foreign policy. In 1983, Ms. Stromberg helped to found MADRE to bring attention to the US-sponsored wars in Central America. Her work has helped to expand MADRE’s programs to every region of the world, and forge lasting ties between the movements for women’s equality, peace and justice, and international human rights, reflecting her strong conviction that women’s rights are human rights, that US foreign policy is a “women’s issue”, and that human rights everywhere are inherently political.

Ms. Stromberg has worked extensively with women in conflict zones on issues of armed conflict and forced displacement; women’s health and reproductive rights; economic justice and community development; Indigenous Peoples’ rights and resources, food security and sustainable development; human rights advocacy; children and youth; and US foreign policy.

As a MADRE representative to the United Nations, Ms. Stromberg has extensive experience in international conferences, including the 1993 United Nations Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women and NGO Women’s Forum in Beijing, China, and the 2001 World Conference on Racism. Ms. Stromberg has presented evidence before international bodies, such as the Organization of American States Inter-American Court on Human Rights and the United Nations Human Rights Commission. She was also a 1994 Expert-in Residence for the WK Kellogg Foundation.