Secretariat - ChildFund Alliance

Joohi Haleem

Senior Adviser, Global Programmes, Partnership and Engagement

Joohi Haleem

Senior Adviser, Global Programmes, Partnership and Engagement

Rebekka Perdereau

Adviser, EU Partnership and Engagement

Secretary General

Meg Gardinier

Meg Gardinier began serving as the Secretary General of ChildFund Alliance in July 2015. A global network of 11 child-focused development and humanitarian organizations, ChildFund Alliance helps nearly 36 million children and their families in 70 countries. Together with children, ChildFund creates sustainable solutions that protect and advance their rights and well-being.

Meg provides strategic leadership to increase the impact and growth of Alliance members. As the chief advocate for the Alliance, she works with members to define strategy and ensure that it builds on the experience of ChildFund in the field. She shapes long-term strategic planning and oversees Alliance-led initiatives, including the global WEB Safe & Wise campaign working to help children safely navigate the internet and protect themselves from online sexual predators.

As an international, not-for-profit advocate, Meg has specialized in issues affecting women and children. She has more than 25 years’ experience in NGO development, advocacy, fundraising, strategic leadership and volunteer management. She has held leadership positions in a range of child rights organizations including at Elevate Children Funders Group; as director of Arigatou International New York; managing director of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF; and executive director of the International Catholic Child Bureau, North America.

Meg also has undertaken consultancies for Save the Children and the Global Network of Religions for Children. She is a founding member of the Campaign for U.S. Ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, serves on the leadership team of Joining Forces—an alliance of the six largest child-focused international NGOs, and is a former board member of ECPAT. Meg holds a Master’s Degree in International Political Economy and Development from Fordham University.

Program Administrative Assistant

Dennis Aveta

Dennis joined ChildFund Alliance as the Program Administrative Assistant in February 2024. In this role, he provides key administrative, financial and human resources support to the ChildFund Alliance Secretariat in New York and Brussels. Working closely with the Secretary General, the Administrative Assistant plays a key role in supporting the global network of ChildFund Alliance members.

Prior to joining the Alliance, Dennis served in a variety of research, knowledge management, and administrative capacities at Columbia University, The Better Care Network, and the CSO Forum on EVAC. He also previously served as the Advocacy Intern for the ChildFund Alliance NY Team back in 2021.

Dennis holds a M.S. in Global Affairs and Global Gender Studies from New York University, as well as a B.A. in International Relations from Saint Anselm College.

Senior Advisor, Advocacy & Policy

Ryan De Souza

Ryan De Souza has worked in the advocacy and policy space for more than a decade. Throughout his career, he has represented the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, always with the focus of turning legislative policy and framework into action and implementation.

He joined ChildFund Alliance in 2021 as the organization’s Advocacy & Policy Advisor. Currently, he is leading ChildFund’s global online safety campaign for children, WEB Safe & Wise: Creating a better digital world with children. Launched in 2022, WEB Safe & Wise focuses on strengthening protections for children online, while also helping them safely navigate the digital world.

Prior to joining ChildFund Alliance, Ryan worked as an Advisor at the Permanent Mission of Trinidad and Tobago to the United Nations where he served on various committees at the UN General Assembly. These included the Economic and Financial Committee (Second Committee) and the Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee (Third Committee). While at the Mission, he worked on various initiatives to promote and protect the rights of children and the advancement of women through the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.

Ryan holds a Master’s Degree in International Trade Policy and a Bachelor’s Degree in International Relations from the University of the West Indies.

Senior Advisor, Humanitarian Affairs

Faith Nimineh

Faith Nimineh is the Senior Advisor, Humanitarian Affairs at ChildFund Alliance in New York. For more than 20 years, Faith has worked in humanitarian development, implementing child protection programs in conflict and post-conflict settings, and championing the rights of children and people affected by conflicts and disasters. She has advocated for the protection of children from abuse, exploitation and violence including in her native country Liberia, where she witnessed and experienced the impact of armed conflict on children and their families.

Faith’s key areas of expertise include child protection in emergencies and development programs, child participation, child safeguarding policy development and implementation, prevention and response to violence against children, and broader humanitarian and development work including social protection strategy.

Before joining ChildFund Alliance, Faith worked with Save the Children UK, UNICEF, and Hiscock Legal Aid Society, and as an independent consultant supporting organizations to develop and implement child safeguarding policies and procedures. She has held senior advisory and program management roles as technical advisor, team leader, and senior manager. She holds a Master’s Degree in International Relations from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology from the University of Liberia. She is married with three children.

Senior Adviser, Global Programmes, Partnership and Engagement

Joohi Haleem

Joohi is a qualified humanitarian and development practitioner with more than 17 years of experience in the sector, both in the field and at HQ level. One of her specific areas of expertise is working with Human Rights Based Approaches (HRBA), Leave No One Behind (LNOB) and Humanitarian-Development-Peace (HDP) Nexus approaches for community-driven resilience-building and sustainable livelihoods development.

Over the years, Joohi has supported multi-sectoral resilience-building programmes in various fragile and protracted crises in diverse locations such as Sri Lanka (post-tsunami), Afghanistan, Syria, and Lebanon. She has extensive experience handling multiple donor portfolios and projects funded by a broad range of institutional and non-institutional donors. Joohi has continually worked to find the most appropriate mechanisms to enable local communities and local civil society actors to claim their rights and entitlements, to build resilience to shocks and crises, and to become strong agents of change.

In her previous capacity as thematic focal point for the HDP (Triple) Nexus, over the past several years, she has been an active member of various NGO coordination and advocacy networks in Brussels and abroad. She has consistently worked to build partnerships with a range of government and civil society stakeholders at all levels of engagement on critical issues such as the growing nexus between fragility-conflict-climate. She has been a Taskforce Member of the Danish NGO Network Global Focus’s two Deep Dive studies on the HDP Nexus, as well as of a Symposium on Fragility organized with the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, IFRC and USAID.

Joohi holds a Master of Science degree from the Development Planning Unit, University College London and a Bachelor of Architecture from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan.

Adviser, EU Partnership and Engagement

Rebekka Perdereau

Rebekka Perdereau joins the ChildFund Alliance as EU Partnership Advisor, bringing more than twelve years of experience in donor relations, resource mobilization, and EU partnerships. Based in Brussels, she has previously worked at UNICEF’s EU Office and with country offices worldwide on funding strategies, proposal development, donor reporting, and relationship management with major public donors, including the European Commission. She previously led resource mobilization efforts in UNICEF Malawi, managing a diverse portfolio of public and private sector partners, and supporting technical teams to secure new funding.

Rebekka also brings private sector experience, having advised start‑ups and entrepreneurs on EU funding opportunities and partnership strategies. She is well‑versed in the Brussels policy landscape, staying closely attuned to political developments and engagement with EU institutions and decision‑makers. She holds a Master’s degree in Multilingual Communication with a specialization in International Relations from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, as well as a Bachelor’s degree in European Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London.

She believes that, in the context of mounting funding constraints and donor fatigue, the Alliance’s greatest strength will be its collective action, leveraging multi‑member collaboration as a strong value proposition to maximize impact of funds for children.