Adaku Utah

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, raised in Festac, Nigeria, grounded in their legacy of organizers, farmers and healers, Adaku harnesses her seasoned skills as a grassroots strategist, abolitionist healer, movement facilitator, somatics coach and ritual artist as an act of love and commitment to her community. They enjoy co-cultivating strategic, sustainable, and impactful social justice leaders and organizations.  For over twenty years, their work has centered on movements for radical social change, with a focus on gender, reproductive, race, youth, and healing justice.  

They are currently the Senior Manager of Movement Building Programs at the Building Movement Project, a national nonprofit organization that catalyzes social change through research, relationships, and resources. Here they get to work with movement-building organizations on short-term rapid-response efforts and long-term projects to deepen solidarity within and across networks and ecosystems. I also uplift narratives through the Solidarity Is This podcast, conduct transformative trainings and workshops, and develop resources and tools to catalyze strategic solidarity practices. 

He most recently was the Organizing Director at the National Network of Abortion Funds, building and mobilizing organizing power and movement building efforts with 90+ member organizations, thousands of individual members, and network leaders across the country and world.

For the past 9 years, they have been co-facilitating Harriet’s Apothecary, an all-Black collective of healers, organizers, and artists committed to embodying Harriet Tubman’s legacy of centering abolition and healing justice in how we organize to create and sustain liberation and transformation. 

She is a Senior teacher and coach with BOLD (Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity), a national leadership training program designed to help rebuild Black social justice infrastructure to organize Black communities more effectively and re-center Black leadership in the U.S. social justice movement. She also teaches and coaches with Generative Somatics, a national organization that supports social and climate justice movements in achieving their visions of a radically transformed society by bringing somatic transformation to movement leaders, organizations, and alliances.


“I'm feeling deeply honored and excited to participate in this year’s Racial Justice Summit. In a time where fragmentation  and burnout are so present in our movements, I’m looking forward to being in a space where we can recalibrate our pace with purpose, reconnect to what matters, and build relationships that feel rooted in trust, care, and collective power.

My offering centers around healing, collective care, and transformative solidarity—all grounded in the belief that liberation isn’t something we fight for in isolation. It’s something we practice together, across roles, lineages, and ecosystems. This year’s theme, Get Together: Becoming the Liberation Ecosystem, resonates deeply with how I approach this work—helping organizers, healers, cultural workers, and strategists remember that we are not separate parts, but living, interdependent strands in a larger web. My session will invite us to deepen that interconnection, listen to our bodies and communities, and explore how we sustain the long haul through collective healing and organizing.”

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Cristina Jiménez