Dilafruz Khonikboyeva
Indigenous Pamiri from Khorog, Tajikistan | Inaugural Executive Director, Home Planet Fund
Dilafruz Khonikboyeva is the Inaugural Executive Director of Home Planet Fund, an independent nonprofit launched in 2024 with $20 million in seed funding from Patagonia. Under her leadership, Home Planet Fund channels its donations directly to Indigenous Peoples and local communities on the front lines of the climate and biodiversity crisis, including partners in the Bartang Valley of Tajikistan, Badakhshan Province in Afghanistan, East Africa, the South Pacific Islands, and Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.
Dilafruz was previously a political appointee of the US Biden-Harris Administration, serving as Senior Advisor for Policy, Planning, and Learning at USAID. She spent five years in global program leadership with the Aga Khan Development Network and eight years total responding to conflict and climate crises, including in Syria, Crimea, and Nepal. She is a transformational conflict expert whose work centers on civil war, environmental conflict, resource conflict, and storytelling.
Dilafruz has served on the Board of her alma mater, the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, and led the Climate Change Working Group for Women of Color Advancing Peace, Security and Conflict Transformation (WCAPS). She is a Presidential Leadership Scholar, selected by the presidential centers and libraries of George W. Bush, William J. Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Lyndon B. Johnson; President Bush later painted her portrait and featured her in his book Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants. Dilafruz is Indigenous Pamiri from Khorog, Tajikistan, and lived through the fall of the Soviet Union and the civil war that followed.
“I as one individual am not separate from the greater mass, not just my own ancestors, but I’m just one speck of stardust, and we all are, and everything around us is.”
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