The National Network of Abortion Funds’ (NNAF) board of directors has chosen not to extend executive director Oriaku Njoku’s contract, according to an email NNAF sent to member funds January 15. Her tenure will end on February 6.

NNAF will be led by its former chief of staff, Poonam Dreyfus-Pai, who will serve as interim executive director while the board searches for new leadership.

“During Oriaku’s time as Executive Director, NNAF navigated critical challenges, including the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision, the voluntary recognition of our staff bargaining unit, and the negotiation of our first union contract,” the email said.

The email pointed to Njoku’s experience as the co-founder and former leader of Access Reproductive Care Southeast (ARC-Southeast).

“Her contributions have laid a strong foundation for the next era of our work,” it continued. “We are deeply grateful to her dedication and wish her all the best in her future endeavors.”

NNAF Communications Director Olivia Martinez declined to comment further on the reasons behind the decision, but she said the organization plans to complete an ongoing strategic planning process before hiring new leadership. NNAF does not expect to have a new executive director in place until early 2026, according to Martinez.

Abortion fund leaders praised Njoku’s track record of leadership within the abortion funding movement.

“I have had the pleasure of working with Oriaku for the last eight years,” Megan Jeyifo, Chicago Abortion Fund’s executive director, said in an email statement to Rewire News Group. “We met in her capacity as Executive Director of ARC-Southeast and served on NNAF’s Operation Scale Up (OSU) Design Team together. Oriaku stewarded NNAF through a difficult chapter.” OSU helped a pilot group of five abortion funds in the Carolinas and the Washington, D.C. area grow and build internal capacity.

Jeyifo said she especially valued Njoku’s experience as a co-founder of ARC-Southeast, which serves Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee. During Njoku’s tenure at ARC, the staff grew from one full-time member—Njoku—to 12.

“Transitions at the network will not impact CAF’s ability to continue to support abortion seekers nationwide, and we imagine this is similar for most funds, who operate as autonomous organizations,” Jeyifo said.

Martinez emphasized Dreyfus-Pai’s qualifications to lead the organization in the interim.

“Poonam has been an active abortion fund member since 2013,” Martinez said, noting that Dreyfus-Pai was previously the deputy director of the All-Options Hoosier Abortion Fund. “Poonam has personally met with every single member of NNAF’s staff and also plans to meet with every single abortion fund in the next 60 days to hear what they need in this transition, and what they need in an upcoming executive director in this next chapter for NNAF.”

Abortion fund leaders told RNG that the announcement of Njoku’s departure came on the heels of a series of focus groups NNAF held with member funds, which Martinez confirmed happened as part of the organization’s strategic planning process. However, board members of several abortion funds said they were caught off guard by the announcement.

“Internally, funds have been putting more pressure on NNAF for more transparency, faster distribution of donations, more fund representation within the organization, and a clearer definition of why NNAF actually exists,” an abortion fund leader who spoke to RNG on the condition of anonymity said.

The anonymous fund leader criticized NNAF for investing in growing its own staff rather than “directly funneling money back to funds doing direct service” post-Dobbs.

These concerns echoed those reported by RNG this summer, when significant funding cuts to financial assistance for abortion procedures from the National Abortion Federation (NAF) and Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) left abortion funds scrambling to fill massive gaps during an already difficult year of funding declines.

While abortion fund staff and volunteers who spoke with RNG in August were primarily critical of NAF and PPFA, several also criticized NNAF for failing to disburse money to local abortion funds quickly and efficiently enough. They also questioned whether consolidating power and money in national organizations will ever be an effective model.

At the time, Njoku told RNG that the crisis—and the larger crisis of a post-Dobbs America—“has called us to really reexamine the ways that we are able to move money,” adding that specifics were “still under discussion.”

NNAF was founded in 1993 by a group of 22 independent abortion funds, and currently has nearly 100 member funds. The organization confirmed that it now has 89 staff members, a significant increase from the years prior to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. The anonymous funder noted that NNAF presently has just three board members, which the organization confirmed. On NNAF’s most recent financial filing, there are 14 board members listed, with four noted as having terms ending in 2022 or early 2023.

NNAF’s budget has also ballooned since Dobbs: In the fiscal year ending in summer 2021, the organization’s total revenue was about $13.5 million. In 2022, it was $53.8 million, a number that fell to just over $49 million in 2023.

However, in 2023, NNAF disbursed only about $18 million in grants and ended the year with nearly $58 million in net assets. Some of these assets could be multi-year grants or money intended for a specific purpose—NNAF reported about $17 million of its assets as having such donor restrictions. However, that leaves $40.7 million in reported assets without restrictions.

NNAF receives large grants from major foundations and high-dollar individual donors, a level of philanthropy few individual funds have been able to tap into. While some large funds, like CAF, have been able to scale up and hire staff, according to a 2022 NNAF report, nearly half of funds remain all-volunteer operations.

The anonymous fund leader said that, in their view, the issue was that Njoku had the right priorities but wasn’t able to effectively push back against institutional inertia.

Njoku “might have been the head of the org, but they weren’t the neck,” the funder said. “I don’t know which person or people exactly make up the neck, but it’s definitely not someone with recent fund experience.”

Njoku did not respond to a request for comment.

UPDATE, January 16, 2025: This article has been updated to include the name of the National Network of Abortion Funds’ spokesperson.