ABOUT US
Decolonizing Strategy and Evaluation
Speaker
Create Good is a BIPOC woman-owned organization founded on the principle that colonial systems cannot be reformed - they must be dismantled. Naaima has experienced firsthand how organizational misalignment between values and action perpetuates colonial harm.
In her over 15 years in the nonprofit sector, she has witnessed how dominant approaches to nonprofit and philanthropic work actively reproduce colonial systems of extraction, exploitation and erasure—maintaining power in the hands of those who have always held it.
Having experienced the marginalization of colonial power structures within the industry, Naaima founded Create Good to build decolonized alternatives with communities ready to dismantle systems of oppression and build power from the margins.
The social good sector can & should do better.
Our Mission
We support communities in decolonizing systems and redistributing power to create self-determined futures.
Our Vision
A world where communities have reclaimed sovereignty and are building anticolonial futures free from extraction and domination.
Our Values
Authenticity
We reject performative allyship and commit to the messy, ongoing work of dismantling our own complicity in colonial systems. Authenticity means naming power imbalances and working to redistribute them.
Abundance Thinking
We reject the scarcity mindset of colonial capitalism and embrace the abundance of collective liberation. Our liberation is interconnected—when one community is free, we all move closer to freedom.
Asset-Based Liberation
We see communities as experts in their own liberation, not problems to be solved. We reject saviorism and commit to building power alongside communities, not for them.
Disruptive Adaptibility
Colonial systems are designed to maintain control. True equity requires disrupting these systems and creating space for possibilities to emerge from the margins.
Revolutionary Perseverance
We understand that the work of decolonizing is generational work. We commit to the long struggle, celebrating small wins while never losing sight of the ultimate goal: complete liberation.
Through her work in philanthropy, Naaima witnessed how networks of power concentrate resources and influence in the hands of already privileged institutions.
This systemic exclusion leaves community-led and BIPOC-led organizations chronically underfunded, while enabling colonial approaches to ‘helping’ maintain dependency and extract knowledge and labor from marginalized communities.
While many social impact organizations state that they are committed to valuing equity, they are not clear on how to move from their words to action.
We must ask deeper questions that challenge colonial foundations:
“Who materially benefits from the way that organizations and structures are designed?”
“How can we redistribute decision-making to those most impacted by systemic inequities?”
Whose knowledge systems are we centering, and whose are we marginalizing?
Inspired by the efforts of those before her, she started to center equity in her own practice.
Naaima then had a stark realization that nothing will truly transform until we build decolonized alternatives that redistribute power and center community wisdom. This work is for those ready to move beyond individual ‘allyship’ to collective action that decolonizes systems of oppression.
Naaima experienced the duality between philanthropic institutions that control resources and community-led efforts fighting for survival.
The contrast revealed a fundamental truth: status quo systems create the dynamic oppressor and the oppressed.
The social sector often perpetuates this dynamic by maintaining power imbalances rather than redistributing them. This misalignment in actions and values has left us struggling to address inequities that have persisted for decades.
It's time for something different.
