I didn’t get into this race to grow people’s theory and intellectual prowess around equity. We got into it because we want to see that become a real … - Nikkita Oliver

I think it’s really important that I sit down and have very important and solution-oriented conversations with the people who have been holding the city down through multiple administrations and find out first what solutions are they wanting to bring to the table. I think that’s really important not just for buy-in but for effective solution building.”

We live in a really messed up society. It’s not equitable. It is still very racist. And white supremacy is very present – and classism, and sexism, and homophobia and transphobia. All of those things permeate the many institutions that we move through, and that has deeply shaped my life, my work trajectory, the things that I do.

I don’t want to end up with more of what philanthropy has done to us, where philanthropy as an industry requires that there are always cash-poor and economically disenfranchised people. The non-profit industrial complex requires that there are always cash-poor and economically disenfranchised people. It is literally built upon people who — if suddenly there were no poor folks — they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves because their entire lives have been built upon this non-profit industrial complex. So, I think that there’s an economic injustice that we’ve allowed to exist for the sake of keeping the non-profit industrial complex going, keeping certain public projects going so we’re not actually invested in ending the actual injustice.