Mary Forfia

Mary joined the GreenLight team in November 2024 as GreenLight Detroit’s Coordinator.

Mary joins GreenLight Fund from Focus: HOPE, where she first served as a food justice volunteer, and then as a VISTA in the Advocacy, Equity, and Community Empowerment department, before joining the staff as a member of the Development team.

Mary is a seasoned operations and philanthropy professional with experience spanning the nonprofit, hospitality, and tourism industries. A born Rustbelter, Mary pursued a variety of opportunities across disciplines and time zones prior to setting roots in the sandy soil of the Motor City in 2017. She was an au pair in Barcelona, a research assistant in Appalachia, a student of liberation pedagogy in Sao Paulo, hospitality staff across a variety of boutique destination properties, and for many years opted out of snow shoveling season to write for an ultra-budget travel guide covering the Yucatan and Central America. A professional “hard left turn” to values-align her paid labor precipitated her entry into the nonprofit landscape of Detroit. 

Over the course of her career, Mary has contributed research to publications on surveillance culture, parallel power, and education justice, provided production assistance and small group facilitation for dozens of equity-centered training sessions for local corporate and non-profit partners, and consistently pursued opportunities to deepen her understanding of the systems that surround and shape our collective circumstances. She is an active member of several local advocacy and mutual aid networks, where she enjoys the extraordinary privilege of learning from the examples of right relationship to community demonstrated by the extensive solidarity, resiliency, and empowerment networks built and maintained by Detroiters.

Mary holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies with a minor in Spanish from Ohio University. She is a former Boren Scholar of Brazilian Portuguese, attained COIL certification by the Catholic Legal Immigration Network in 2021, and maintains professional credentials in CRM database administration, donor organizing, and prospect management. When not devising the worst puns you’ve ever heard, Mary enjoys overindulging in crafting supplies, exasperating her niblings and godchildren at every opportunity, and breaking in her newest pair of boots with a wander in the woods.