Nicole Salmon

Written By Nneka Allen

Spending over twenty-five years working in the non-profit sector managing a variety of fundraising portfolios, Nicole is a former Director of Fund Development for a Canadian international development organization (INGO). In 2014, Nicole founded Boundless Philanthropy a fundraising consultancy providing a range of fund development services, including interim senior leadership, strategy development and leadership development. 

Joining The Charity Report in 2021as a contributing editor, she is also the co-editor and contributing author of the book Collecting Courage: Joy, Pain, Freedom, Love an anthology featuring 15 contributors and 14 first-person narratives from Black fundraisers from Canada and the United States.

Nicole serves on the Board of Realize, an organization working to improve the lives of people living with HIV and other episodic conditions, and is Board Chair at WellFort Community Health Services. She is also a Book Review Panelist with The Charity Report Literary Hub, an inspired and founding member of the Black Canadian Fundraisers’ Collective.

Shaped by her Jamaican identity and deeply influenced by spending two-thirds of her life in Canada, Nicole is entranced by the power of words and language, anchored by family, committed to service, building connections and deepening personal relationships.

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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