Akilah Massey is a vice president at Grantmakers for Effective Organizations and an experienced program designer with over a decade of experience creating educational programs for grantmakers. Before joining GEO, she developed programming at Exponent Philanthropy, an association of small-staffed grantmakers.

While at Exponent Philanthropy, she spearheaded the CONNECT Conference, a philanthropy conference devoted to highlighting the connections that sustain philanthropic work. She also led Exponent Philanthropy’s technology content area, writing articles, blog posts and building programs on technology resources for grantmaking organizations. She further collaborated with grantmakers, colleague organizations, and nonprofit organizations to craft seminars, workshops and online programming on a variety of philanthropy-related topics with the intent of improving the effectiveness of small-staffed grantmakers.

At the start of her career, Akilah worked at a small Cleveland-area children’s rehabilitation hospital where she got to interact with very cool kids every day. She currently volunteers as a Court-Appointed Special Advocate or CASA in Washington, DC, working in a different capacity with children currently in the foster care system.