Leila Abadir

Member Organizer
(She/her, They/Them)

Leila Abadir is an organizer and birth worker committed to building self-determination for Black and Brown communities through mutual aid, cooperatives and grassroots organizing.  Leila’s spent her adult life as an activist and organizer. She got her feet wet as a foot soldier for Amnesty International as a freshman at Georgia State University working on immigration with HB 87, and anti-death penalty work focused on the case of Troy Davis. She later went on to become the Student Activist Coordinator for the Southeast region. Leila then began grassroots work through movements such as Occupy and the fight around justice for Trayvon Martin.

Through engagements in organic People’s movements directed at the exploitive and inherently white-supremacist nature of our economic and criminal justice institutions, she began more community-based organizing efforts as the membership coordinator of Occupy Our Homes Atlanta and tenant-led organizing against gentrification in Bankhead. After completion of her Bachelor’s, she held the Project Manager position at A Healing Paradigm where she was able to coordinate the therapeutic healing work of incarcerated individuals granted executive clemency under Barack Obama.

These days Leila focuses her work around supporting the health of individuals and communities by building solidarity economies and building on her technical skills to be able to serve the direct health needs of mothers and babies through Georgia’s (and the nations) Black Maternal health crisis. Her work with OHRD is centered around building the economic institutions that can serve as a tool for Black and Brown communities to work, live and play on their own terms.