UWC-USA is pleased to announce that Ashindi Maxton ‘93 is the recipient of the 2022 Giulio Regeni Alumni Impact Award. Ashindi is the Co-Founder of the Donors of Color Network, a first of its kind philanthropic community of Black, Indigenous, Asian-American, Latino and Arab-American donors committed to systemic racial justice. As the founding Executive Director, Ashindi co-led the Climate Funders Justice Campaign which has helped move tens of millions of dollars to organizations at the intersection of climate and racial justice and has just been named a “World-Changing Idea” by Fast Company. Ashindi also co-authored two widely distributed research reports: “The Apparitional Donor: Understanding and Engaging High Net Worth Donors of Color” and “Philanthropy Always Sounds like Someone Else: A Portrait of High Net Worth Donors of Color”.
Ashindi has developed funding strategies informing more than $100 million in investments from foundations and individual donors towards racial justice and a more inclusive democracy. Projects she created or co-created to support power building in traditionally marginalized communities include the Reflective Democracy Campaign, the Youth Engagement Fund, and New Media Ventures.
In addition to her work in philanthropy, Ashindi served as the National Policy Director of the NAACP where she created the first Policy Handbook synthesizing one hundred years of civil rights policy. As the National Director of Political Partnerships for SEIU she developed projects to support Asian-American civic participation in 5 states, to register low-income voters in health centers nationally, and to collect data that was critical to overturning a Pennsylvania Voter ID law that stood to disenfranchise 750,000 voters during a presidential election year.
In another life, Ashindi also served as the principal of an arts charter school and as a very happy bilingual Spanish 4th and 5th grade teacher. She was also a Fulbright Scholar to the Dominican Republic researching race consciousness in young children.
Ashindi currently serves on the boards of the Way to Win and Voqal USA. She was recognized by Inside Philanthropy as “Donor Organizer of the Year” as a member of the co-founding team of the Donors of Color Network. She has also been listed three times to Washington Magazine’s “Young and the Guest List” of “forty and under geniuses, visionaries, crusaders and innovators shaping Washington’s future” and the “NAACP Power 40” list of most influential African-Americans under forty.