Arina Lester

Arina Lester is the Resource Development and Planning Director at the Solidarity Center, the largest US-based international grassroots worker rights organization with work in nearly 70 countries. She joined the Solidarity Center at the end of 2019 right before the pandemic, bringing to the position more than a decade of professional experience in international development and social justice tied to external stakeholder relationship building, strategic organizational planning and fundraising. During her five years at the Solidarity Center, Arina has established the Solidarity Center’s infrastructure for private fundraising efforts. The Solidarity Center’s philanthropic funding tripled from $900,000 in 2019 to a projected annual budget of nearly $4 million in 2024. Through targeted outreach and education efforts, the Solidarity Center has built new relationships with private progressive foundations with a greater reach beyond the traditional US government funder pool, allowing the Solidarity Center to explore innovative new programming and diversity of funds. 

Prior to her position at the Solidarity Center, she served as Development Director at Community Preservation and Development Corporation/Enterprise Community Partners, on urban poverty and affordable housing, and Legacies of War/NEO Philanthropy, on the removal of leftover unexploded ordnance in post-war Southeast Asia. Before her focus on philanthropy, Arina worked at the Fair Labor Association and the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Washington, DC. In Southeast Asia, Arina also provided capacity-building training to indigenous communities in the Lao and Thai highlands for the German development agency GIZ. Arina holds a master’s degree in sustainable international development from Brandeis University and a bachelor’s degree in history and anthropology from the University of Heidelberg. 

Arina is a first-generation immigrant to the US where she finally settled down with her husband Chris and their four children, Isabella (6), Eleanora (3) and their twin boys (1), Isaac and Theo. She was originally born and raised in Germany and is the proud daughter of Lao refugees who were resettled in Germany in the early 70s during the Secret War in Laos. Arina is fluent in five languages, German, Lao, English, Thai, and French. Arina grew up in a union household as the proud daughter of a steelworker. In Germany, she was an active member of the DGB-Jugend, youth committee member of the ETUC.