Heidi Lehmann
Email: Heidi.Lehmann@rescue.org

Heidi Lehmann has over fifteen years experience in Africa, Asia and the US and is an internationally recognized expert on violence against women and girls in conflict zones.  Her work as a public health professional has taken her to some of the worst conflict zones and natural disasters in recent history including Darfur, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone and Haiti.  She is currently the Director of the International Rescue Committee’s (IRC’s) Women’s Protection and Empowerment Technical Unit where she leads IRC’s work on policy, programming and advocacy issues related to violence against women and girls.

Ms. Lehmann has her Masters in Public Health with a concentration in maternal and child health care from the University of South Florida.  Before working for IRC, she was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana for three years.  This was followed by work at one of the largest domestic violence shelters in Florida.  She followed this with work at the Children’s Justice Center in Tampa where she worked with child and adult survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence.  She has facilitated batterers’ intervention groups and started one to the first batterer intervention groups for the LGBTI community in Southern Florida.

She currently serves as the NGO Co-Chair for the Gender-Based Violence Area of Responsibility Working Group alongside UNFPA and UNICEF.  Her leadership in this group has helped facilitate a more predictable, accountable and effective response to violence against women and girls in emergencies.

Ms. Lehmann has worked for IRC for the last ten years, starting in Sierra Leone where she spent 2 years developing programming to support and empower women and girls.  During that time she helped conceptualize, fund, and start to start one of the first sexual assault referral centers in West Africa.  In her current role, she supervises a team of technical experts focused on ending violence against women and girls. She spends over 50% of her time in the field working with staff and partners and learning from the women and girls that IRC supports.