Akonadi Foundation

Applications for our 2026 Fund are now live!

We're so proud to support Oakland-based groups who seek to ignite and implement a radical collective vision of freedom and racial justice. This year, we’re prioritizing:
🌟 Storytelling advancing belonging and counters the doom loop narrative
🌟 Arts & culture spaces bringing people together to inspire collective action
🌟 Projects fostering collaboration between movement leaders, community leaders and artists/culture bearers

Apply by June 30th and learn more here: https://akonadi.org/so-love-can-win/

Our 2026 Racial Justice Poster, “Get In Where You Fit In,” celebrates all the ways we can show up for our communities. Few demonstrate that sentiment more powerfully than our partners at Urban Peace Movement and the remarkable young leaders they’re cultivating every day.

UPM builds youth leadership in Oakland to transform the culture and social conditions that lead to community violence and mass incarceration in communities of color. At the heart of their approach is “Healing-Centered Youth Organizing,” a model that supports young people to feel self-confident and hopeful while empowering them to work for healing, social justice, and a brighter future for all.

As we move toward the midterms, Urban Peace Movement’s youth organizers know the stakes have never been higher. UPM’s youth leaders stand up for issues that affect our families and neighborhoods most: racial justice, community-rooted safety, cultural preservation, and power building for young people in our most marginalized communities.

Right now, UPM’s youth leaders are campaigning to end the use of pepper spray on youth in detention facilities, and they’re asking all of us to join in – attend a council meeting, join a campaign, sign a petition, and turn out to insist on solutions that honor our progressive community values.

Learn more about Urban Peace Movement’s work: https://urbanpeacemovement.org/

Our 2026 Racial Justice Poster, “Get In Where You Fit In,” created by artist Thi Bui, beautifully captures all of the ways we can all show up in our communities. Our partners at Oaklash live out this ethos every day in their work with Oakland’s q***r and trans communities.

Oaklash produces large-scale drag performances, facilitates mutual aid, and provides mentorship to emerging q***r and trans leaders in nightlife. Their year-round programming creates safe and accessible environments celebrating the full diversity of intersectional identities in the community.

And in 2026, Oaklash continues to lean in and double down on political engagement and community mutual aid as the new status quo. As Mama Celeste shared with us, “meet your neighbors, volunteer for causes you believe in, and share what resources you have —not because things are bad right now but because this is the ecosystem we need for progress to happen in the Bay Area and around the country.”

Thank you, Oaklash, for the joy, creativity, care and celebration you bring to our community. We are so proud to support your work. Learn more about Oaklash here: https://www.oaklash.com/

For 17 years, Akonadi has invested in the Racial Justice Poster Project to celebrate Oakland’s rich community of artists and lift up the connection between art and activism.

The 2026 Racial Justice Poster, “Get In Where You Fit In,” was created by writer and artist Thi Bui. Our new blog features a conversation between poster artist Thi Bui and Akonadi Founder and Board Chair Quinn Delaney on the role of art in Oakland activism, what it looks like to see yourself in a movement, and how philanthropy can engage artists to build and sustain real change over the long term.

Thi’s message for funders on investing in the arts? “It’s such a gift to be honored as a whole person and to be given the space and freedom to really create, rather than just illustrate an idea or meet a request in a transactional way. A lot of people think that when they engage with an artist, they have to already envision what they want, so the artist just executes, and that loses so much of the magic of what art and artists can do.”

Read their full conversation here: https://akonadi.org/finding-heart-and-courage-in-difficult-times-through-art/

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Our 2026 Racial Justice Poster theme, “Get In Where You Fit In,” celebrates all the ways people show up for one another and for their communities.

For our partners at Saba Grocers Initiative - سبأ للأكل الصحي, that means making sure everyone has access to healthy food and trusted information about health and well-being. This year, Saba Grocers is focused on deepening relationships with residents and strengthening community-led advocacy around food access.

At the same time, they are navigating real challenges. Anticipated SNAP cuts under HR.1, “The One Big Beautiful Act,” are already creating stress for both residents and small store owners, and the uncertainty is real. Saba Grocers is staying closely connected with Alameda County Social Services to share updates on CalFresh changes and work requirements, while continuing to advocate for clearer data and greater investment in community-based solutions.

Even at this moment, their commitment remains the same: to build power with residents and ensure their voices drive the policies that affect their quality of life and health.

We’re proud to invest in organizations like Saba Grocers. Learn more about their work: https://www.sabagrocers.org/our-story

Yesterday, we celebrated the birthday of revolutionary leader and activist El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, more widely known as Malcolm X.

This past Saturday, our Senior Program Officer, Demetria Huntsman, attended East Side Arts Alliance's 26th Annual Malcolm X JazzArts Festival. The festival, which brings together arts, culture, community and healing, occurs every year during the week of Brother Malcolm’s birthday.

For our latest blog, Demetria wrote about Malcolm’s understanding of something that many political movements still struggle to fully embrace: that the fight for Black liberation is inseparable from the cultural imagination of Black people. At Akonadi, our healing, arts, and culture strategy is grounded in this same understanding that creativity is and has always been a force for resistance and transformation.

To EastSide Arts Alliance: we thank you for what you have built and sustained for over two decades. In a political moment that tries, relentlessly, to rob us of joy, you keep creating space for it.

And to Brother Malcolm, whose birthday we celebrate with full hearts, thank you for showing us what it looks like to love your people all the way to the end.

All photos by Demetria, featuring her cousins, Lyndsey and Thelonious.

Read more reflections: https://akonadi.org/remembering-malcolm-x-through-art-and-celebration-in-oakland/

Our 2026 Racial Justice Poster theme, “Get In Where You Fit In,” reminds us that everyone has a role to play in building a just world, and that work doesn’t only revolve around going to vote. For our partners at Oakland Rising, civic engagement isn’t just about turnout during election cycles.

They use the civic process to build political power for and with BIPOC, working-class, immigrant, and formerly incarcerated community members to bring about systemic change. By flexing people power, aligning like-minded forces, and developing values-based leaders, they are doing the deep work of dismantling systems of oppression and building a real, inclusive democracy led by the communities who have historically and systemically been left out of the political decisions.

At a time when communities are navigating federal attacks, shrinking resources, and exacerbating inequality, this work is more important than ever. Oakland Rising believes it’s critical that Black, immigrant, and working-class communities are not just responding to the moment but shaping what’s next.

🌟 Thank you, Oakland Rising, for keeping our community engaged all year round. Learn more about their work: https://www.oaklandrising.org/

💫 This year’s Racial Justice Poster, “Get In Where You Fit In,” created by artist Thi Bui, celebrates the many ways we can all contribute to building a more just world. Bay Resistance lives out this concept every day in their work.

This broad-based, multi-racial coalition of community groups, faith organizations, labor unions, and everyday neighbors is organizing to build mass resistance against ICE, federal overreach, militarization, and the criminalization of our communities.

Over 6,600 people across 180 neighborhood-based pods have found their spot in this movement. Drawing on what worked during the Minneapolis occupation, the pods are small, hyperlocal groups that can mobilize quickly in response to ICE and federal attacks and sustain community power beyond moments of crisis.

Now Bay Resistance is channeling that collective energy towards organizing around May Day which commemorates labor movements, running targeted campaigns to hold corporations accountable for colluding with ICE, and expanding local capacity for collective action.

We are so proud to stand alongside them. Learn more about Bay Resistance’s work: https://www.bayresistance.org/

Last week, Akonadi co-hosted the Alameda County Together (ACT) for All funder forum with East Bay Community Foundation and Zellerbach Family Foundation. ACT for All is an ad hoc committee that brings together local government, philanthropy, and grassroots organizations to create coordinated responses to federal policy changes and budgets that harm our communities.

Similarly, the convening brought together philanthropic partners, elected leaders, and community voices to reflect on ACT for All's accomplishments thus far and the road ahead as threats to local communities continue to intensify.

Last spring, Nikki Fortunato Bas, Supervisor and Supervisor Elisa Márquez amplified the community's calls for support, and Akonadi was proud to be among the foundations that responded by channeling several million dollars to protect immigrant communities and ensure food access across the county.

The forum highlighted what the investment made possible and, more importantly, where gaps still remain. We hope this briefing sparks a new wave of commitments to support community-led efforts from our partners in philanthropy.

Major thank you to folks from the organizations below for joining us as speakers:
🌟 Oakland Thrives
🌟 Daily Bowl
🌟 Eden United Church of Christ
🌟 Mandela Partners
🌟 Centro Legal de la Raza / Alameda Community Immigrant Legal and Education Partnership
🌟 California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice / Alameda County Collaborative for Immigrant Defense
🌟 Trabajadores Unidos Workers United / Alameda County United in Defense of Immigrant Rights

If you're interested in supporting, learn more and get in touch on ACT for All's website: https://district5.alamedacountyca.gov/actforall/

Every May 1, millions of people across the world commemorate International Workers' Day, which honors the historic struggle of working people who fought for the rights and protections so many of us rely on today.

This year, our grantee partners showed up and showed out. They led and participated in demonstrations across Oakland, calling for fair pay, safer working conditions, and an end to ICE operations in our airports and on our streets.

We are proud to be in close partnership with the organizations who are on the ground working fiercely to build a more just and equitable Oakland for working families.

Shoutout to our incredible partners at Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA), East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, ACCE Action, and Trabajadores Unidos Workers United for their leadership.

📸 Photos courtesy of the partners listed above.