Naimah Bilal

Naimah Bilal is a Washington DC native, nonprofit leader, and fundraising executive.  Drawing inspiration from her prior career as an orchestral violinist and symphonic programming executive, Naimah has spearheaded wide-ranging fund and artistic development efforts for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Cincinnati Waldorf School, and the University of Cincinnati where she currently serves as Director of Foundation Board Relations. I this hybrid role she manages a spectrum of enterprise governance efforts and manages a major gift portfolio. Driven by a desire to elevate the experiences and narratives of black and brown leaders, Naimah launched "Bawse With A Cause", the first podcast devoted exclusively to profiling the stories, perspectives, and insights of black and brown executives in the wider nonprofit sector.  She is also a co-host of Urban Consulate Cincinnati, a national platform for urban exchange on topics of equity and justice. She received her Bachelors and Masters Degrees at Indiana University Bloomington and Case Western Reserve Univesity. She is now pursuing her MBA with a concentration in Economics at the UC Lindner College of Business. She serves on numerous national arts boards and volunteers as a recitalist for nursing homes. 

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/
Previous
Previous

Olumide (Mide) Akerewusi

Next
Next

Birgit Smith Burton