Where capital
meets community.
Impact and narrative strategy for investors and funders, founders, and movements deciding how money moves — and who owns the assets.
Start a conversation →Every engagement begins with a conversation.
You sit between money and mission.
Cousin Futures works with people and teams across the capital conversation.
- You hold capital. You want deeper relationships with the communities most impacted — and sharper detail on the impact itself.
- You're seeking capital. You want funders and investors to understand your work on its own terms — and fully resource it.
- You're stepping out front. You've done the work — now you want to be known for it.
Wherever you sit, you're shaping how money moves — and who owns the assets.
Offers
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Impact Strategy
Align capital with the communities most impacted.
Strategic counsel for the people moving capital and the people raising it — how it's structured, where it lands, and the story it tells.
Integrated capital strategy · Strategic planning · Accountability frameworks · Impact reporting
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Stakeholder Engagement
Engage the people invested in your community and work.
Stewarding the relationships you already have — and identifying who else belongs in the room.
Stakeholder mapping · Investor & community relations · Engagement, from workshops to panels
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Executive Communications
Step out from behind the work.
Show up clear, composed, and compelling — on stage, on the record, and even on short notice.
Public speaking preparation · Media training · Podcast development · Narrative & thought-leadership positioning
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Bespoke
Bring what you're facing.
Bespoke packages designed to solve information and strategy gaps. Nyia will shape the work with you.
Cousin Futures exists to help capital reach community — and stay accountable to it. The "cousin" in Cousin Futures is deliberate: it points to an older, sturdier way of building and stewarding wealth — through kinship and solidarity. "Futures" is a promise: that another economy is not only possible, but already being built.
Capital comes from community, depends on community, and resources community. The work is making that connection legible — so capital stops extracting from the people it relies on, and starts building with them. Who are the cousins you're building with?
In journalism, reading how money and power move.
In grants and investments supported annually at the Center for Cultural Innovation.
Nyia Hawkins is an impact strategist and advisor working at the intersection of economic power, ownership, and narrative. She asks the questions: Who has access to capital? Who decides where it goes? Who has to live with the result?
She came to this work after 20 years in newsrooms at the Associated Press, CGTN, and Cheddar, the last decade of it on the global business and economics beat. At the AmbitioUS initiative at the Center for Cultural Innovation, she supported a grant and investment portfolio of more than $1.5M a year — drafting investment memos for board approval, supporting due diligence, helping track the pipeline, and providing communications and narrative support to the portfolio's grantees and investees.
Nyia is an alum of the Just Economy Institute (JEI) Fellowship and the Frontier Market Scout Fellowship at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. She holds a Master of Arts in Broadcast Journalism from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a Bachelor of Arts in American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
The Soul of Capital
Models for a Just Economy — introducing alternative economic models and the changemakers building a more inclusive, sustainable, and equitable economy. Nyia created, produced, and hosted the show, published and presented by the AmbitioUS initiative at the Center for Cultural Innovation.