Meryl Frank

Meryl Frank is president of Makeda Global Network, an international consulting firm that works with thousands of women worldwide, and a member of the US Holocaust Memorial Council. Over a long and varied career, she has been an activist, a mayor, an ambassador, and champion of women's leadership and political participation around the world. She has worked across multiple continents offering leadership and media training, advice on good governance and policy-making, and media and film programs to lift up refugees torn from their homeland. In the United States, she has developed policy and advocated for paid parental leave, HIV/AIDS awareness and the Equal Rights Amendment, raised money for presidential candidates and many other office-seekers. Frank came to wide public prominence in 2000 when she led a grassroots campaign against the deeply entrenched political machine in her hometown of Highland Park, New Jersey, and won election as mayor, a position she held for the next ten years. In 2009, President Obama appointed her United States Representative and, subsequently, Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. In 2012, the Jerusalem Post selected her as one of the fifty most influential Jews in the world.
Frank has served on the boards of the American Jewish Congress Jewish Women International, Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom, the New Israel Fund and Warmheart Worldwide. She has also served in leadership roles with the Democratic National Committee's National Women's Leadership Forum, the National Finance Committee, and the National Jewish Leadership Council. She is a former Executive Director of FilmAid International, a nonprofit organization which uses film and media to empower and educate refugee populations. She lives in Highland Park, New Jersey.