Lana Woolf is the co-founder and International Programs Director of Edge Effect which works to ensure that the rights, needs and strengths of people with diverse SOGIESC are addressed in development and humanitarian programs. Edge Effect works in various countries, including those where backlash, violence and stigma leads to exclusion of people with diverse SOGIESC from development programs and humanitarian assistance. She is the co-author of Down By The River: Addressing the rights, needs and strengths of Fijian sexual and gender minorities in disaster risk reduction and humanitarian response.
Lana has two research papers to be published in 2020 – one of the backlash and resistance experienced by LGBTIQ+ and women’s rights activists in Tanzania, Tonga, Sri Lanka and St Lucia, commissioned by the Equality and Justice Alliance, and one “Intersectionality of Disability, Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and/or Expression, and Sexual Characteristics in Development and Humanitarian Contexts” commissioned by Australia’s DFAT.
Lana’s overarching mission is to work with others to break down the heteronormativity, cisnormativity, gender binarism and dydacism which exists in the world.
Lana is also the women behind Radical Wellbeing for Activists, and has been inspired by others including some of the IFED board members on her journey to take better care of herself to be able to sustain her fight for a better world.
Lana identifies as the L in LGBTIQ+ and is the mother of three young men. She is of Fijian and Scottish heritage living in Australia and is loving the new L Word – Next Generation – it is making her feel like it is the 1990’s again – of which she believes is the best decade ever to have existed.
