Olumide (Mide) Akerewusi

Written By Nneka Allen

Mide is Founder and CEO of AgentsC Inc., an international company delivering philanthropy solutions to the non-profit and private sector. Mide has extensive experience of working with major philanthropists, corporations, and grant-making foundations as well as charities and NGOs in Australia, Canada, South Africa, UK, and the USA.

As a British born African living in Canada, Mide’s perspectives are uniquely diverse and frequently thought provoking. He is an advocate for equity philanthropy, implementing unique philanthropic opportunities to the social determinants of health, UN Sustainable Development Goals, and social impact investments.

 Mide obtained a B.Sc (Hons) degree in Business Studies and Sociology from the University of Surrey, and an M.Sc. (Econ) in the Political Economy of Asia and Africa from SOAS, University of London. He is a Certified Social Responsibility Practitioner (CSR-P) and qualified in Dialogue Education (CDEP). 

With more than 25 years’ experience as a philanthropy expert, Mide has also founded and chaired the Black Fundraisers Network - a voluntary organization supporting fundraisers to learn about philanthropy within Europe’s African and Caribbean diaspora.  He is a former Board member of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, Toronto Chapter, and currently serves on the Board of 100 Strong.

Prior to establishing AgentsC, Mide served as Director of Leadership Philanthropy at Pathways to Education Canada, where he launched and successfully completed the organisation’s $185 million Graduation Nation Campaign. Before Pathways, Mide served as Chief Development Officer at the YMCA of Greater Toronto. He has also led major gift fundraising teams and campaigns at Scope UK, The British Red Cross, and The Children’s Society in England and Wales.

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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