Terri Langston

Senior Editor, The Globalist

Terri Langston is Senior Editor at The Globalist. Throughout her career, which she primarily spent as a program officer and foundation executive in the U.S. non-profit sector, Terri has focused on economic justice issues and bringing about social change.

The focus of her work was on tackling social and political inequities. Issues of particular interest have included equitable access to health care, poverty, gun control, women’s rights, worker rights, democratic rights and rural America.

From 1987 to 2010, Ms. Langston worked as senior program officer for health reform and as director of programs at the Public Welfare Foundation in Washington, D.C. In that capacity, she pioneered a movement to align a broad variety of U.S. foundations in support of consumer advocacy on health reform, primarily on the state, but also on the national level.

Subsequently, she served as a consultant to organizations such as the Open Society Foundations, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, the Washington Regional Association of Grantmakers and the National Council on the Aging.

In 1993, Ms. Langston was among the early funders to support the efforts of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (VVAF) in its International Campaign to Ban Landmines, to persuade countries to sign a treaty eradicating the use of antipersonnel landmines — an effort for which VVAF received the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize.

Throughout the 1990s, her program work at Public Welfare Foundation also included support for the legal advocacy work and the public educational work of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

In 2008, Ms. Langston received the Terrence Kennan Leadership Award in Health Philanthropy, conferred annually by Grantmakers in Health to an individual whose work is distinguished by leadership, innovation and achievement.

Ms. Langston holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bonn, Germany, in 1981-1982. During her time in Germany, she was also engaged in emergency supplies to Poland to Poland during the martial law period.

She wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on Paul Celan, one of the major German-language poets of the post-World War II era.