Lejla serves as DJC’s Associate Director of Development. She organizes values-aligned donors to provide sustained and coordinated support for DJC. She’s deeply passionate about the role fundraising can play in mobilizing community and building power for grassroots movements.

Before joining DJC, Lejla supported arts & culture and social justice spaces in greater Detroit, including the Arab American National Museum (AANM) and Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative. During her term as the AANM’s Community Events Organizer, she helped lead and institutionalize the Museum’s anti-oppression efforts. She was a 2020 Racial Equity Fellow with the Detroit Equity Action Lab, a program of the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights.

Lejla loves historic cemeteries, the mountainside of her motherland, and her fur baby Luna, a Russian Blue cat. Originally from Bosnia and Herzegovina (the former Yugoslavia), Lejla is based in Detroit.