Who We Are
Brianna J. Suárez, MA
Brianna Julissa Suárez, Principal Consultant
Brianna Suárez, M.A, is a philanthropic professional and has spent the last seven years as a steward of equitable and inclusive grantmaking practices. Brianna comes to this work as connector and convener, drawing on her professional training at American University’s School of International Service to amplify the most marginalized and vulnerable voices and perspectives. She is a program officer at the Victoria Foundation in Newark, NJ co-creating a racial equity strategic shift for their next phase of grantmaking. Brianna has managed up to $10M in annual grantmaking with a focus on building diverse grantee portfolios with added capacity-building investments. She has a background in creating communities of sharing and power building as well as asking and supporting difficult questions, all with a commitment to equity and solidarity practices.
Prior to joining the Victoria Foundation, Brianna served as a Program Associate with the Max and Majorie Fisher Foundation. In this role, Brianna was was tasked with founding, developing, and implementing Brightmoor Leaders, a foundation initiative that allows social impact leaders to apply for grants up to $5,000 to spend on opportunities that will expand their knowledge in their respective fields. In year one, 28 leaders received grants and the Foundation expended a total of $100,000. This program was part of a larger capacity-building portfolio with a focus on equity and inclusion. Additionally, at Fisher, Brianna led the foundation in supporting second generation leadership transition from an organizational standpoint. Before the Fisher Foundation, Brianna served as an executive assistant to then executive director of the National Center for Family Philanthropy (NCFP), Ginny Esposito. In this role, Brianna developed a keen awareness of the domestic and global landscape of giving. This awareness was informed by her initial acclimation to the field through her role as a research assistant at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP). Brianna brings this nexus of experience, as well as her experiences growing up in Southwest Detroit, to bear on her advisement efforts.
Bianca A. Suárez, PhD
Bianca Ayanna Suárez, Consultant and Learning Praxis Coordinator
Bianca Suárez, PhD, is an independent community-based researcher, educational equity consultant, and learning coach. For the past ten years she has undertaken critical research in areas of urban social institutions, colonialism, and radical social movement history and practice. She has taught at the college level in Education and Latino/a Studies. For the past five years she has focused her efforts on creating and transforming programs to serve the desires and interests of racialized students and communities. From this Ethnic Studies approach to system redesign, deep thinking, and curriculum development, she more recently served as Principal Investigator and Director of the Wayne State McNair Scholars Program managing a $1.2M federal grant, Grant Development and Implementation Consultant to the Wayne State Graduate School’s SURGE Program, and Lecturer for the Wayne State Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies. Bianca draws upon her theoretical and applied training at the University of California Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education to reimagine the public purposes of deep thinking and education centering self-determination and liberation in all forms.
Key Partners
Stephanie Kimou, MA
Stephanie Kimou
Principal Consultant, Populations Works Africa
Stephanie Kimou is the founder and lead consultant for PopWorks Africa. She is an international development professional responsible for successful communications and advocacy programs related to sexual and reproductive health and rights. With a background in youth and gender, she has extensive in-country experience in francophone Africa, particularly with building and advising advocacy strategies, infusing meaningful youth engagement into development agendas, and building relationships and partnerships with governmental agencies and iNGOs for sustainable and locally rooted development solutions.
Building Bridges for Stronger Communities.
“This program is part of a larger capacity-building portfolio that I manage, but this is most important to me because the focus is equity and inclusion. I have focused on creating an accessible pathway for community members to apply. This includes being mindful of literacy levels, understanding that not everyone has access to a computer or the internet to upload their application, and creating space for conversation regarding the development of “ideas” to aid in the grant writing process. By building these relationships and fortifying what are often private processes with the desires/ideas, my work seeks to humanize development in the city through an overtly conscientious process of disrupting the legacies of social injustice in the region”
- Brianna J. Suárez on her work in the Brightmoor neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan.