Jawanza Malone is the Executive Director of the Wieboldt Foundation. During his tenure, he has launched a cohort of grassroots community organizing groups to help them build their organizational and power-building capacities, established an internship program to recruit young leaders into the field of community organizing, increased the size of grant awards going to grantee partners to better equip them to win, and diversified the investment strategy of the foundation. Jawanza comes from the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), one of the oldest Black-led grassroots membership-based community-organizing groups in Chicago, where he served as a community organizer, coalition builder, and executive director.
Jawanza’s extensive background in community organizing and program development has led him to work in both the public and private sectors, and with communities on five continents. Jawanza received a Bachelor of the Arts degree in Sociology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Master of the Arts degree in Community Counseling from the Illinois School of Professional Psychology at Argosy University. Jawanza seeks to live in accordance with the Kenyan proverb, “Treat the world well for it was not given to you by your parents, it was lent to you by your children.”