Marva Wisdom

Written By Nneka Allen

Marva Wisdom is a leading voice in Canada on empowering social change and is a committed social justice advocate.  She is among the most respected and sought facilitator, moderator and speaker on equity, inclusivity.  Marva’s skills, talent and experience have contributed to significant projects, including as outreach director for the frequently referenced Black Experience (Research) Project (Environics Institute), Lead Advisor for the City of Guelph’s Award Winning Community Plan and Director of Musagetes Foundation’s ArtsEverywhere Festival. 

Her volunteer leadership spans 3 decades including, the YM-YWCA, United Way, Guelph Black Heritage Society, Canadian Centre for Diversity, Operation Black Vote Canada, and Rotary.

Marva’s recognitions include the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal, YWCA’s Woman of Distinction and the University of Guelph’s Lang School of Business, Alumni Award.

Marva holds a Master of Arts in Leadership and is a Senior Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy (University of Toronto).

Nneka Allen

Nneka Allen is a Black woman, a Momma and a daughter of the Underground Railroad. She descends from African survivors of the TransAtlantic Slave Trade. Through the centuries-long unparalleled forced free labour of Africans in the United States, her ancestors helped build North America. In the process, a historic relationship developed with the First Peoples of Turtle Island and as a result, the Cherokee and the Lumbee are her relations.

Born in the 70s, Nneka was raised during a time of Black power and acute political awareness in North America. As a result, the air in her childhood home was generous, brilliant and proud. Her parents and their siblings with great intentionality poured their consciousness into her multi-ethnic identity.

Nneka is a relationship builder, a stone-catcher, a freedom fighter, a storyteller and a leadership coach. As a lover of justice, Nneka has inspired philanthropy as a Fundraising Executive in the charitable sector for 25 years. As the Principal and Founder of The Empathy Agency Inc., she helps leaders and their teams deliver more fairly on their missions by coaching them to explore the impact identity has on culture and equity outcomes. Through the The Empathy Agency, she helps leaders cultivate belonging spaces.

Nneka is also the founder of the Black Canadian Fundraisers' Collective, a group of fundraisers who inspire and elevate the philanthropic sector in the African tradition of Ubuntu - "I am because we are". She is an award-winning author and joint editor of a book featuring the first-person narratives of 15 Black contributors, mainly fundraisers from the United States and Canada called Collecting Courage: Joy, Pain, Freedom, Love. In 2022/23, Nneka was also one of the first Scholars-in-Residence on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at the University of British Columbia, where she delivered a provocative lecture called Us and Them: What it Really Means to Belong.

Her ultimate joy is her daughter Destiny and her husband Skylar. Along with their dogs Sophi and Sammi, they live and work on the unsurrendered and stolen shared territory of the Stó:lō Coast Salish peoples. She honours the survival of the Indigenous nations of Turtle Island, despite genocide. She grieves the theft and the subjugation of colonization and white supremacy culture. And as a forced inhabitant of these beautiful territories, she is challenged to confront the cost of living on this land with nowhere else to call home. It is only through the historical relationship and collective wisdom of her African and Indigenous ancestors that she is here today. It is from this place that her activism emerges.

https://www.theempathyagency.ca/
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