Nadia Owusu

Nadia Owusu

Nadia leads Living Cities’ racial equity and inclusion, knowledge management, and research portfolios.

Nadia is Associate Director for Learning and Equity at Living Cities, a racial economic justice organization focused on closing the racial income and wealth gaps. In this role, she leads Living Cities’ racial equity and inclusion, knowledge management, and research portfolios. Recent highlights include spearheading efforts to articulate a new mission and vision for Living Cities that centers dismantling structural racism; designing new, more equitable, processes for hiring, procurement, and talent management; designing and developing a digital platform for practitioners working to close racial income and wealth gaps to come together and share what they are learning in real time; and conducting research to better understand the racial homeownership gap in America.

Before joining Living Cities, Nadia worked on program strategy, communications, community engagement, and fundraising for a microfinance organization operating in Africa’s Great Lakes region. Previously, she was a journalist and editorial assistant at Doubledown Media, publisher of multiple finance-oriented magazines. She has also worked and volunteered for an array of youth service organizations in New York, including Bridge Builders Community Partnership and Shakespeare for Kids.

Nadia is a graduate of Pace University (BA), Hunter College (MS), and of the Mountainview MFA program where she studied creative non-fiction. She serves on ioby’s Board of Directors. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Rumpus, Catapult, The Huffington Post, Electric Literature, and Nonprofit Quarterly, among other publications. Her first book, a memoir about displacement, blackness, family, and trauma, is forthcoming from Simon and Schuster. She lives in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn where she can often be found writing at her favorite coffee shop, or in the park if the weather’s nice.

Nadia Owusu

Contributing Articles

An Invitation to Center Race in Government Responses to COVID-19

We are asking how to best move the long-term work of closing racial gaps in income and wealth through partnership with city governments, while acknowledging and affirming the immediate crisis that public servants are addressing. We are committed to our vision of a united, multi-sector movement for racial equity, while recognizing the importance of physical distancing and grieving the imminent …

Turning the Mirror Onto Ourselves

Part of what we’ve learned from looking at the evolution of work in our Integration Initiative cities is that everything ties back to racial equity. The root cause of so many of the inequities we see in cities around the country is racism. As an organization that takes pride in being at the cutting edge of solutions to address the …

Living Our Values as a 21st Century Learning Organization: Lessons from Digital Community Engagement

We spent two years building a digital community engagement tool to help practitioners close racial gaps. We share our lessons learned in a new report. Living Cities has been exploring and defining what it means to be a 21st century learning organization since its inception in 1991. We have always placed a premium on learning over success. Ben Hecht, our …

What We’re Reading: A Terrible Thing to Waste, by Harriet A. Washington

Ten, twenty, one hundred times a day, I think about the end times. They are coming and I am terrified. In July, Alaska experienced record-high heat of 90 degrees Fahrenheit. A paper released by an Australian think tank laid out future scenarios, based on scientific research about climate change, that include massive displacement, cities abandoned, and devastating food shortages by …

Beyond Counting Policies: Measuring Progress in Racial Equity

We are lifting up lessons we’ve learned from our Racial Equity Here cohort, five cities working to operationalize racial equity in local governments. Check out our Racial Equity Here page for more about what we’ve learned from this work. People of color in U.S. cities disproportionately and historically lack access to opportunities – from education to employment – and many of the …

The Personal is Professional When it Comes to Closing Racial Income and Wealth Gaps

In this blog, Elodie Baquerot and Nadia Owusu outline our organization’s long and intentional journey to center racial justice. Elodie and Nadia participated in CompassPoint’s Organizational Equity Leadership Development Program over the last year, along with five other grantees of the Kresge Foundation. This blog post is originally posted at Compass Point Living Cities is an organization that is working to …

Connecting Communities to Close Racial Gaps

Living Cities has been committed to ending the systemic challenges to poverty for over 25 years. But despite the best efforts of this organization and our many partners, forty six million Americans are still living in poverty. The field has evolved in the 25 years since Living Cities began its work–and it continues to evolve. But we know one thing …

Operationalizing Racial Equity & Inclusion: Centering Arts, Culture, and Healing

This series highlights the twelve themes we uncovered in our scan of practices being used by organizations to operationalize racial equity. We recently released a report titled “What Does it Take to Embed a Racial Equity & Inclusion Lens?” that captures themes from internal interviews, a field scan, and learnings from our grantmaking and investments in cities across the country. …

Operationalizing Racial Equity & Inclusion: Shifting Systems of Power

This series highlights the twelve themes we uncovered in our scan of practices being used by organizations to operationalize racial equity. We recently released a report titled “What Does it Take to Embed a Racial Equity & Inclusion Lens?” that captures themes from internal interviews, a field scan, and learnings from our grantmaking and investments in cities across the country. …

Operationalizing Racial Equity & Inclusion: Transforming Organizations and Beyond

This series highlights the twelve themes we uncovered in our scan of practices being used by organizations to operationalize racial equity. We recently released a report titled “What Does it Take to Embed a Racial Equity & Inclusion Lens?” that captures themes from internal interviews, a field scan, and learnings from our grantmaking and investments in cities across the country. …

Operationalizing Racial Equity & Inclusion: Contextualizing Systems, Data, and Place

This series highlights the twelve themes we uncovered in our scan of practices being used by organizations to operationalize racial equity. This series highlights the twelve themes we uncovered in our scan of practices being used by organizations to operationalize racial equity. *We recently released a report titled “What Does it Take to Embed a Racial Equity & Inclusion Lens?” …

Operationalizing Racial Equity & Inclusion at Living Cities: Tools for Getting Started and Keeping At It

These are some of the resources and contacts we have shared with organizations who are looking to embed racial equity and inclusion into their work. Living Cities is working to close racial income and wealth gaps in America’s cities. Like any organization or system, Living Cities is made of individual people, all of whom need to be better equipped to …

A Signature Moment for Advancing Racial Equity in America’s Cities

Despite the current tone of our national electoral politics, we are seeing more and more cities, institutions and individuals explicitly committing to advancing and achieving racial equity. The essays in this series speak to what we can learn from the past and how, together, we can do this. At Living Cities, we envision America’s cities as places where all citizens …

5 Questions for Demetric Duckett, Living Cities’ New Associate Director of Capital Innovation

The newest addition to the Living Cities team answers five questions about his career path, hopes and aspirations. Living Cities is thrilled to welcome Demetric Duckett to our Capital Innovation team! Demetric joined Living Cities in July 2016 as Associate Director of Capital Innovation. He works to blend public, private and philanthropic financial resources in new ways to better meet the …

What I Learned from a Gathering of i-teams in Memphis

In March of 2016, seventeen i-teams from around the United States and Israel came together in Memphis for two days to collectively grapple with the most pressing challenges facing cities around the world, and to learn from each other and other leaders about promising solutions to those challenges. From being the home of the Blues and the birthplace of Rock …

Open-Sourcing Social Change: Help Us to Build a Solutions Toolbox

For the last three years, we have been thinking very differently about our annual reports, focusing them on engaging folks around ideas, insights, trends, and questions. We learned a lot from our experiences, and built that into this year’s annual report, a Toolbox. On Wednesday, Living Cities launched our 2015 Annual Report. We called it #HereAndNow: The New Urban Practice Toolbox. …

Living Cities’ Civic Tech Journey: An Open-Sourcing Social Change Case Study

We set out to learn about civic technology, unsure of where our learning questions would lead us. Our open-sourced approach offered us endless opportunities to deepen our knowledge and expand our impact. Living Cities believes that the pace of social change is too slow; the scale too small. We are impatient. We know that we must do better to fight …

Contributing Resources

Closing the Gaps Webinar Series

The reality of COVID-19’s scope and impact is just beginning to sink in and in many ways is still unknown. At Living Cities, we are doing our best to hold the complexities that come with racial equity work, particularly in a time of global pandemic. Join Living Cities and public sector peers on April 1, April 8, or May 5, …

The Road to Inclusion: How 21st Century Learning Organizations Can Engage Community Online

We created a tool to understand what it takes to use digital technologies to encourage learning and racial equity. This report outlines what we learned from the process. Living Cities has been exploring and defining what it means to be a 21st century learning organization since its inception in 1991. We have always placed a premium on learning over success. …

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