Amanda Padilla leads the Strategic Engagement team at Namati where her work spans strategic communications, narrative development, impact filmmaking, digital growth and engagement, partnerships, national campaigns and advocacy, creative direction and branding, and operations. She builds and manages a global team, overseeing budgets, systems, work plans, and structures that support organizational priorities.
She partners with Namati’s global teams and senior leadership to influence governments, funders, practitioners, and the media to action. She also leads impact campaigns for short documentaries she has directed and produced, including work screened at the Smithsonian’s Museum of African Art, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, the DC Environmental Film Festival, the Harlem Film Festival hosted by the New School’s Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy and in Oxford during the Skoll World Forum.
Over the past 15 years, Amanda has worked across the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors on a range of human rights issues, always at the nexus of partnerships and strategic engagement. At Humanity United, she helped launch the Partnership for Freedom with U.S. government agencies, announced by President Obama in 2012.
Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, she has lived across Central America and Southeast Asia with shorter stays in Africa and Europe. Amanda has her MA in International Politics and BA in Mass Communications.