Meet Linda Lu, AFG’s New Co-Executive Director

Meet our new Co-Executive Director, Linda Lu! Her work is on the cutting edge of feminist and decolonized research focusing on intergenerational communities and youth of color. We couldn’t be more excited to have her join the AFG team! 

Linda brings extensive leadership experience to AFG in research and evaluation design and analysis, strategic planning, and creative facilitation –– and, she’s a mom of two kids! 

Here’s how her personal and professional journey led her to Alliance for Girls. 

✨Linda was born in Taiwan and immigrated to the US with her mom and older sister when she was three. Linda is bilingual in Mandarin and English, but growing up in a small town she assimilated as a way to belong in a community where people didn’t look like her. Her work in equity and access draws, in part, from her immigrant experience, translating for her mom and helping her navigate systems that were not built by immigrants, women, and other marginalized people. 

✨Linda was raised by her mom and was in high school when her family moved to Fremont, CA. While there was a lot of love at home, Linda and her family faced daily struggles because of harmful policies that didn’t center the intersectional needs of immigrant single mothers. This deepend Linda’s curiosity about the world we could build in which her mom could have truly thrived.   

✨ Her lived experiences led her to roles with the Chinese American Service League in Chicago where she tutored intergenerational families, supporting youth with their homework and seniors with their US citizenship exams, as well as serving on their youth advisory board. 

✨  Linda attended UC San Diego, and received her Master’s in Cultural and Education Policy Studies at Loyola University Chicago. Because she wanted to focus on gender equity in education, she created her own concentration that drew from Women’s Studies and Gender Studies, Feminist Research Methods, and Post-Colonial Theory to analyze educational policy and practice. Her research examined differences between access to education for girls and quality education driven by girls’ epistemological experiences. Wherein the former led to disconnection and reinforcement of neoliberal globalization of learning.  

✨ Linda has volunteered and spent time doing research in Guatemala, Thailand, Cambodia, Tibet, and India where she has witnessed the impact of global “development” on communities, specifically women and girls. This sparked her interest in learning more about what it takes to find balance between cultural and historical location and “development.” Moreover, it cemented her belief in an AFG value – that those closest to the problem are closest to the solution. 

✨Linda honed her foundational research and evaluation skills at the research firm Public Profit. As Director of Strategy and Learning at the non-profit advocacy Partnership for Children & Youth, she learned how to leverage a community of practice effectively to create a real system of support for the after-school sector in California. Linda is excited to apply her experience to strengthen our connection with AFG member organizations. 

✨Linda’s journey to live what she was learning led her to found Evaluation Studio in 2017, an innovative and community-centered research and evaluation firm. With a team of innovative and like-minded researchers,  ES has been able to do more than just research, but upend knowledge creation by centering the experiences and voices of the communities they serve. 

✨ Linda and Evaluation Studio has been partnering with AFG for nearly five years on the majority of its research and evaluation projects and has authored AFG’s reports: Girl You Can Do Anything, Radical Visions of Safety, and Uniting Isolated Voices. Linda has also supported the research and evaluation work of several AFG member organizations. 

✨Linda served on the youth advisory boards for the Chicago Foundation for Women and the Chinese-American Service League. She also served on the Girls, Inc. of West Contra Costa board. 

✨Linda and her partner, Tom, are raising two future feminists and reside in Oakland.  

We are fortunate to have Linda serve as AFG’s new Co-Executive Director. We look forward to her leadership working alongside Chantal in this new phase of AFG’s work.