Member Spotlight: Akonadi Foundation

For the month of October, GIA’s photo banner features work supported by Akonadi Foundation.

Founded in 2000, Akonadi Foundation is an Oakland based family foundation that invests in place-based organizing, racial equity policy advocacy, and culture shift to dismantle structural racism and build community power. A large part of Akonadi Foundation’s work focuses on the intersection of culture and racial justice.

In 2013, Akonadi Foundation launched the Beloved Community Fund, to support the use of art and culture to build voice and self-determination in Oakland’s communities of color. Through the fund, Akonadi has awarded over $1.8 million to over 270 organizations.

Oakland has a deep history that is inextricably tied to the cultural and political legacies of Black and multi-ethnic immigrant communities that have called it home for decades. Today, there is a reassertion of Black spaces and organizations that affirm and celebrate the presence Black and Brown communities in light of accelerated displacement, the rising cost of living, and economic pressures.

In response to this critical need, in February 2018, Akonadi launched BOOST, the Beloved Community Fund’s Organizational Strengthening Pilot. In this two-year pilot program, funded in part through the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, five Oakland-based organizations received a total of $100,000 in technical assistance and capacity building support.

Additionally, in June 2018, Akonadi partnered with the Kenneth Rainin Foundation to produce a benchmark mapping report on grassroots arts and culture organizations with budgets of $250,000 or less to build understanding and spur investments for their work. The report visibilizes grassroots organizations’ deep ties within communities of color in an attempt to understand how they sustain their work when many fall outside of regional funding portfolios. (See GIA’s news post on this report.)

Akonadi Foundation joined Grantmakers in the Arts in 2017.

You can also visit the Akonadi Foundation photo gallery on GIA’s Photo Credits page.

Image: Rizal Adanza
Lxs Hociconxs Theater Lab is one of Akonadi Foundation's grantees.