Celebratory Gala

Angelique Power is the President & CEO of the Detroit-based Skillman Foundation, a private independent foundation that puts all its resources toward brilliant Detroit youth—their justice, their power, and their promise. With assets over $600 million, The Skillman Foundation provides approximately $24 million in grants annually. Beyond dollars, the secret sauce of The Skillman Foundation is its focus on youth power, understanding that in the primarily young, primarily Black and Brown city of Detroit—must be the designers of their own destiny whose vision leads us to the liberatory future we all deserve.

Prior to The Skillman Foundation, Power was President of the Chicago-based Field Foundation. During her tenure, she designed a journey with staff, board, and nonprofit partners to center racial justice, changing how it funds and who it funds, created accountability structures for community to review its work, rethought metrics, created heatmaps that illustrate the design of inequity within Chicago, and updated its investment policy.

Power co-founded Enrich Chicago, dedicated to anti-racism organizing, and helped to found Just Action, a collaborative of 200+ organizations and individuals focused on helping institutions activate their 2020 racial equity statements. Power chairs the board of 6018North, is a trustee for the Julian Grace Foundation and is on Mayor Duggan’s Workforce Development Board. Angelique has a BA from University of Michigan and both an MFA and an honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Natalie Diaz is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press, and her second book, Postcolonial Love Poem, was published by Graywolf Press in March 2020 for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2021. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow, a United States Artists Ford Fellow, and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. Diaz is Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.