Our History

For almost 20 years, Quinn Delaney and Wayne Jordan have supported a variety of youth organizing, youth development and civil rights organizations.  Around 2000, they saw an exciting crop of youth organizations emerge that gave them new ideas about how to be most effective as philanthropists.  Out of these ideas came the Akonadi Foundation.

In 1999, youth groups in the San Francisco Bay Area began campaigning against Proposition 21, a statewide ballot initiative Californians would vote on the following March.  Prop 21 aimed to put 14-year-olds in adult courts and 16-year-olds in adult prisons.  The wave of youth activism it provoked captured the imagination of people across the country, as well as newspaper headlines from coast to coast.

Quinn and Wayne noticed something different about how these organizations approached their work.  Each was committed to a vision of racial justice.  Not simply of fairness for young people, or funding for schools, or any particular issue, but an overarching vision for racial justice.  This vision was a large part of what made their work so exciting.  Quinn and Wayne decided that they wanted to support more organizations with that kind of vision.

After a series of meetings with organizational leaders throughout the Bay Area, Quinn and Wayne were convinced that a new foundation focused explicitly on racial justice would be an important addition.

That is when they launched the Akonadi Foundation, named after the oracle goddess of justice in Ghana. 

For almost five years, Akonadi supported groups it saw making a contribution to racial justice. The successes were exciting.  In response to 9/11, the leading public policy institute on race, the Applied Research Center, hosted community forums to expose the human costs of a national security program that targets communities of color, developed toolkits for action, and released We Area All Suspects Now, by Colorlines Editor, Tram Nguyen.  Locally, Akonadi grantee and outstanding base-building organization in Oakland, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, played a critical role in stopping the Pacific Renaissance Plaza Chinatown evictions, which allowed tenants to return to their homes and to have continued access to medical, cultural and social services.

As exciting as these early successes were, the foundation staff knew that Akonadi could be even more effective.  The foundation embarked on an 18-month strategic planning process.  At the end, it had a bold new plan for not only supporting racial justice organizations, but for nurturing an entire movement that can finally put an end to the structural racism that lies at the heart of social inequity in the United States.

This new "movement-building" orientation is a huge step forward for Akonadi.  The foundation is excited about how far it has come in just a few years, and looks forward to many more years as a part of this movement.