Rae Abileah is a social change strategist, author, editor, ritual facilitator, and advocate for collective liberation and economic justice. For over fifteen years she’s worked with nonprofits and social movements, from volunteer to executive director. She now runs her own consultancy supporting clients to create impactful events, publish books, coordinate strategic campaigns, mark life transitions with moving rituals, and achieve their wildest dreams.Whether serving on a board, facilitating a training, editing a manuscript, or standing up with social movements, she is curious and passionate about finding ways to disrupt structures of inequality and make freedom contagious in the everyday world.
She is a trainer and contributing editor at Beautiful Trouble and she is the co-creator of the global Climate Ribbon storytelling art ritual project. She is currently serving her second term on the West Region Executive Committee of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). She was the co-director of CODEPINK Women for Peace for nearly a decade, followed by a two-year tenure consulting on digital strategy for social justice causes at ThoughtWorks.
Rae is a contributing author to numerous books including Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution; Beyond Tribal Loyalties: Personal Stories of Jewish Peace Activists; Sisters Singing: Blessings, Prayers, Art, Songs, Poetry and Sacred Stories By Women; and Siddur HaKohanot: A Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook. Her articles have been published in various print and online sites from Huffington Post to Tikkun Magazine.
Rae graduated from Barnard College at Columbia University with a dual degree in Environmental Science and Human Rights, and received ordination by the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute. She was the recipient of the Rising Peacemakers Award from the Agape Foundation.
One of Rae’s passions is leading peace-building and justice-seeking delegations to countries including El Salvador, Iran, Israel/Palestine, India and Thailand, with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, CODEPINK, Global Exchange, Eyewitness Palestine (formerly Interfaith Peace-Builders), and American Jewish World Service.
Rae’s matrilineage is Dutch and Belgian; her patrilineage is Israeli and Eastern European / Ashkenazi Jewish. She is a first-generation American on her father’s side. Her ancestry informs her relationship to war and oppression, and her actions toward dismantling white supremacy. Her queer nature sparks her work toward shaking up entrenched patriarchal power dynamics and cultivating embodied, multi-gender, counter-oppressive communities. She was raised on the California coastline with a deep reverence for the ocean and the redwoods.
Rae lives on the land of the Ramaytush Ohlone people, in the California Bay Area.
Pronouns: she/they
