JaNay Queen Nazaire

JaNay Queen Nazaire

JaNay Queen Nazaire is a facilitator, collaborator, and bridge-builder with a fierce belief that every person has the right to a healthy, abundant, and connected life.

As Chief Strategy Officer, Dr. Queen convenes and leverages public, private, and philanthropic stakeholders in American cities, identifies and tests innovative approaches to deploy millions in public and private capital for investing in people of color, and harnesses and facilitates the power and resources of 18 multibillion-dollar foundations and financial institutions working collectively towards systems change. In her role, she developed the organizational framework and theory of change to direct Living Cities’ portfolio and focus its partnerships and programs on closing racial gaps in income and wealth so that all people in U.S. cities are economically secure and building wealth. Additionally, Dr. Queen provides oversight for programs and ensures resource alignment, manages board relationships, builds and maintains external partnerships, and measures organizational progress and outcomes for improvement, learning, replication, and/or scalability. Throughout her career, Dr. Queen has worked across sectors, at every level of government, domestically, and internationally to provide innovative, creative, and solution-focused leadership and strategy to address social and economic challenges for children, adults, families, and communities.

Dr. Queen is grateful for her experience and the opportunity to work on outcomes for children, adults, families, and communities in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors; as well as in academia, having taught Leadership in Public Policy at UMD, and continuing to serve as faculty for the Health Leadership Fellows sponsored by the Health Foundation of Western and Central New York.

Her passion is in building relationships and leveraging networks to empower and mobilize leaders across the globe, as they advocate for people who have been disproportionately left out and systematically denied social, political and economic opportunity.

JaNay Queen Nazaire

Contributing Articles

Doing the Right Things Right

Living Cities’ new Theory of Change represents our unique position on how to close racial gaps across the country. My colleagues like to joke that no matter what we’re talking about or what meeting I’m in, I’m always asking: Are we doing the right things and are we doing them right? This is how I make sure that we are …

Reimagining Black Wealth: Asking 400 Year Old Questions

As researchers and conveners, we know that addressing the root causes for our country’s racial disparities requires expertise and radical collaboration. On our quest to understand what it takes to achieve more equitable outcomes for all people in a country undergoing rapid demographic shift, Living Cities is not only doubling-down on the use of capital as a driving mechanism of …

Building Inclusive Ecosystems: Reflections from HBCU@SXSW [PODCAST]

How can we build ecosystems that put entrepreneurs of color at the center? At HBCU@SXSW we had a conversation about how inclusive ecosystem building can address the country’s legacy of racial disparities by engaging, investing in, and supporting founders of color. This March, we joined OHUB in Austin for their signature program, HBCU@SXSW, where African American, Pan Asian, and Latinx …

Capital for the New Majority: Reflections from HBCU@SXSW [PODCAST]

What does it take to disrupt barriers to access to capital for people of color and shift who ultimately gets to grow and build wealth? At HBCU@SXSW we had a conversation with ecosystem builders and capital providers about how increasing investments in founders and fund managers of color can help address racial wealth gaps. Opportunity Hub (OHUB) is the leading future …

Skills Development and Talent Placement: Reflections from HBCU@SXSW [PODCAST]

What does it take for companies to operationalize racial equity? At Opportunity Hub’s HBCU@SXSW we chatted with leaders in the tech field about how companies can support black and brown entrepreneurs through skills development and talent placement. Opportunity Hub (OHUB) is the leading future of work, startup entrepreneurship, early stage investment and multi-generational wealth creation for everyone, everywhere. OHUB is …

Bringing Our Results Framework to Life: Building a Data Culture

In the first of this two-part series, we introduced the intersection of racial equity and results-focus in our work, and shared how we’ve come to recognize that any strategy for economic justice must address structural racism as a root cause. In this piece, we tell the story of bringing that commitment to life by shifting our organizational culture. By all indications, racial …

Getting Real About Results

Philanthropy holds more than $1.5 trillion in assets globally, more than the U.S. federal government’s entire budget in 2018. Despite the fact that much of this funding goes toward social change work, gaps in outcomes across areas like health, education, income, and wealth are getting worse, not better. As a collaborative of the largest U.S. foundations and financial institutions dedicated to …

Rewriting the Rules: Builders and Benefactors’ Influence on the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

To explore all the content from the Builders & Benefactors, scroll down to the end of this piece. Systems change requires the undoing and restructuring of policies, practices, and power structures that have long existed and maintained harmful inequities. These inequities have held people in positions of limited resources, wealth, and agency. Rather than working in temporary fixes that overlook …

My Equation for Systems Change Results

I challenge collective impact teams working in service of better results for people, especially people who have been marginalized for generations, to consider this formula as a frame to guide their work. In my last post, I argued that creating conditions for economic security requires more than job creation and wage growth. In fact, it requires transforming systems across public and …

The Social Determinants of Economic Security

We have heard about the social determinants of health, but how do social indicators impact an ecosystem’s ability to provide economic security?

What does it take to create opportunities for high-quality jobs?

A steady, well-paying job can make a big difference in someone’s life. If we want to achieve dramatically better results for low-income people, faster, we must focus on creating opportunities for low-income people to access and secure high-quality jobs. Creating these opportunities is one of the biggest and long-standing challenges of community development efforts. Where should we begin to tackle …

Applying a Racial Equity and Inclusion Lens to Collective Impact

Racial equity and inclusion are integral to collective impact’s core principles. Partnerships must make a commitment to applying a racial equity and inclusion lens throughout its work, in order to achieve equitable change for all people they seek to serve. Collective Impact is a journey toward changing systems that impacts the lives of entire populations. If we don’t address racial …

Contributing Resources

Achieving Results by Centering Race Internally and Externally

Living Cities has committed to a new vision and mission that focus on closing racial gaps. This Theory of Change outlines how it will achieve its new goals. Living Cities’ members recently made a commitment to work together and fund our work for another three years–this time with an explicit focus on racial equity. This is the first time in …

Data Inventory

This Data Inventory will help you identify which metrics and measures you need to determine if you are achieving your goals and continuously improving. To achieve a shared result, you must collect data that tracks progress towards that shared result. Oftentimes, that data you want for your initiative may not exist, or may not be readily accessible to you. The Data …

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