Rhiannon Carnes, is the Founder and Executive Director of Ohio Women’s Alliance (OWA) & Ohio Women’s Action Fund, a statewide Reproductive Justice organization building power across Ohio. Rhiannon built OWA to share her hopes for an Ohio that prioritizes the well-being, prosperity, and liberation of women of color, gender-expansive folks, and young people. She envisioned a year-round organizing group that centers grassroots leaders in Ohio. To get started, she set out on a state-wide listening tour to identify the issues that impact Ohio constituents the most, the challenges we face, and the hopes and priorities we have for the future of our communities. The tour led to our Pillars of Prosperity—the values platform that laid the foundation for the official launch of Ohio Women’s Alliance in late 2019 and OWA Action Fund in 2020. 

Since then, Rhiannon’s accomplishments have been celebrated in Elle, The Nation, Harper’s BAZAAR, and Cosmopolitan; she was recently named a Woman of Achievement by YWCA Columbus; in 2024 she was named a Ms. Foundation Woman of Vision by the Ms. Foundation; and in 2022, she was named a Reproductive Justice Hero and a 2022 Jane Bagley Lehman Award winner by the Tides’ Foundation.

Prior to building OWA & OWA Action Fund, Rhiannon Carnes became the founder and leader of Ohio’s Women’s March, where she collaborated with national leaders and recruited over 100 volunteers. And on January 21, 2017, over 15,000 women, gender-expansive folks, and allies took the Ohio streets. After the success of the Women’s March, she became a field organizer with Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio, where she worked for two years.