Lubna Maria Elia joined BII in 2025 to spearhead our field-building work. She has 25 years of leadership experience at mission-driven institutions and impact-oriented funds, and brings deep expertise in field-building, fundraising, and operations. In 2016, Lubna founded the New England Impact Investing Initiative (NEIII), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that strives to democratize access to impact investing education and build a thriving and diverse impact investing industry in New England and beyond. Lubna has held a variety of leadership roles at nonprofits advancing economic and social justice. Most recently, she served as Chief Administrative Officer at BlueHub Capital, a national CDFI. Previously, she served as Chief Operating Officer at Compass Working Capital, an organization that promotes asset building for families with low incomes. At Root Capital, an international lender that transforms rural communities, she held a variety of roles, including fundraising, legal resource coordination, GRC (governance, risk management & compliance), and human resources. Prior to that, she led resource development at Design that Matters, a design-for-development firm, and served as director of development at Teach for America-Houston (TFA), a national teacher corps aimed at strengthening education in public schools. While at TFA, Lubna founded a diocesan-wide Catholic young adult program, Bayou Awakening, and as a result of that effort, she became the first lay Campus Minister in the diocese and served at the University of Houston Catholic Newman Center, where she taught a prize-winning course on economic justice based on learnings from the coffee crisis. Lubna is fluent in Spanish, has an M.A. in international relations from Boston University, and a B.A. in humanities honors from the University of Texas at Austin, where she specialized in economic development in Latin America. She serves on the Board of Directors of Prime Coalition and NEIII.