We build with community, and partner with communities who build for themselves

Real estate futurism rooted in values of shared prosperity and building a world where everybody has a home that loves them back.

Adinkra Strategies
is a collective of technical experts guided by the power of imagination and our vision to build communities from love

Adinkra Strategies is a
collective of technical experts

guided by the power of
imagination and our vision

to build communities from love.

ABOUT ADINKRA

Adinkra Strategies was established to evolve the economies of real estate development into one that is held accountable to the social, political, cultural and ecological relationships that support our collective well-being.

Our technical expertise in real estate development, community-led land use planning, risk management, organizational development, and humanity-centred encampment responses is anchored by the urgent need to take better care of each other and our planet.

We help you get curious about how your values are showing up in your internal operations, real estate projects, partnerships, and community. Whether you’re you’re an informal collective, in startup mode, preparing for growth, or making a strategic leap, we enable wayfinding around obstacles towards the horizon line of your vision.

By honouring the gifts passed down by our ancestors, and healing our collective traumas, we work in ways that uphold the values of mutual benefit, connection, shared humanity, and innovation.

Together, our shared values are the foundation upon which we will build, ensuring that current and future generations can thrive

Everyone deserves a loving home nested with communities of shared prosperity.

THE PROCESS

What if the ways we develop organizations, housing, and cities were led by the ideals of our shared humanity?

At Adinkra, we don’t do things the normal way, because we already know the normal way does not lead to better community care. That’s why we’ve developed the PAUSE DREAM PLAN MOVE system, which allows us to create real plans that actually provide change for those in need.

PAUSE

Using project management fundamentals jazzed up with our unique flavours, our iterative process starts with a PAUSE to enable relationship building, historical review, and creating space for team members to catch a breath and let the imagination spark.

DREAM

Next, we want you to DREAM a little. Though a customized strategic visioning process we do a deep dive on your purpose as a group, affirm goals, and imagine what it will look like for you to realize your desired impacts. We want to hear about the bold, audacious reasons your group exists. During this step, our team will do a deep dive on operations and context, past and present, documenting, both internal and external factors that can either enable or constrain your chances to realize your vision. We draw from specialized experts and big thinkers, past and present, with similar visions of the future, enlisting other supporting perspectives to ensure the dream comes fully into view.

PLAN

Following this, together, we collaborate on building a PLAN of action respecting the financial, environmental, social, cultural, regulatory, legal, and human capacities required to advance your dream. In this phase we rely on the broad-spectrum data collected previously, document and refine analysis, assess risks, and structure recommended priorities with a map of how to move forward. The Plan will also include suggestions for collaborations and opportunities for cooperation. Where a trail needs to be blazed, we will document the performance metrics groups can use track progress in the right direction.

MOVE

After planning, we MOVE. In this phase, groups are set up to formally adopt and execute their Plan, advance towards near and long-term goals. Depending on what emerges from your Plan, Adinkra Strategies may be well aligned collaborator if your goals include community-based real estate development, affordable housing, supporting homeless people into housing, or strategic planning. We are reminded of the African proverb: if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.

Once you have traveled some distance towards your goal, we can work with you on the next iteration of your groups efforts to Pause Dream Plan Move.

PAST CLIENTS & COLLABORATORS

Aboriginal Housing Management Association.png

OUR Services

Organizations and communities that are driven by bold visions of a better world rely on new ways of working. Our magic comes from how we do what we do, working from the strength of mutually beneficial relationships, a mastery of business and real estate fundamentals, and an advanced analysis of systems and structures.

Instead of empty catchphrases, our values are visible in how we work and what we build. We perform as if the future of our human family and planetary home depends on our success because it does. And we choose to work with communities and organizations—small or large—that feel the same.

Housing & Land Use

• Affordable housing
• Community land trusts
• Social purpose financing
• Homeless encampment response
• Resident-led land use planning
• Mixed-use real estate development
Strategy & Planning

• Values-driven performance planning
• Organizational development
• Enterprise risk management
• Fractional and interim executive leadership
• Strategic plans
Policy & Research

• Housing
• Economic development
• Poverty reduction
• Qualitative methods

In Collaboration

Adinkra Strategies works in a consulting co-operative structure together with values-aligned organizations. Remember Voltron? Well just like them, we link up when duty calls, combining our respective strengths in ways that allow for greater creativity, strength, and capacity for the benefit of our projects, clients, community, and environment.

PARTNER WITH ADINKRA

BEHIND THE NAME

Rooted in the past, thriving/sharing in the present, dreaming of the future.

Adinkras are visual symbols that represent concepts, proverbs, and philosophies in West African culture, offering a concise way to convey deep meanings in visual form (similar to the Yin & Yang symbol from Taoist culture).

Adinkras are often enlisted by Black-led organizations and people of African descent to honour our ancestors in the work we do. Like the Sankofa Adinkra, we look back to look ahead. By lifting up & honouring the lessons taught by those in our ancestry who survived the genocide of slavery, we ground ourselves in love, community, and hope, reminded that nothing is impossible.

Community care is what allowed our ancestors to survive, and it will give us what we need to push beyond the harmful limits of the status quo in our present time.

We selected Odo Nnyew Fie Kwanas as the symbol for our company, which means “Love does not lose its way home. Those led by love always end up in the right place.” This Adinkra points to the inseparability between home and love—in our dwellings, communities, and physical bodies. It reminds us that no matter how far we may have strayed, we can always find our way again when we put love in the centre.

MEET OUR FOUNDER

Stephanie Allen is the driving force behind Adinkra Strategies.

She is a real estate futurist who has worked in the real estate development sector since 2002, quickly ascending in the private sector to partnership and senior leadership roles, and working in executive roles in the non-profit and government housing sectors.

She is a nationally recognized expert on how systems & structures shape urban development and her experience spans the housing continuum from leading market developments, to supporting homeless people living in encampments.

Stephanie grew up in public housing and holds a bachelor’s in business administration and a master’s in urban studies which was internationally recognized in 2020 by the Western Association of Graduate Schools (WAGS) & Pro-Quest with their Distinguished Master’s Thesis Award in Humanities, Social Sciences, Education, and Business Disciplines.

Drawing also on her lived experiences of growing up in social housing, Stephanie’s understanding of how much home shapes a person’s sense of self and this informs her work in housing. Named after her grandmother, her values of sharing and hospitality are imbedded in her approach to collaborations and community-building.

She is a co-founder and past Director of Hogan’s Alley Society, past Director of the Federation of Black Canadians, and has served on the City of Vancouver’s Development Permit Advisory Committee.

In 2021 Stephanie was awarded the BC Multiculturalism and Anti-Racism Awards, in the Breaking Barriers category and she has been recognized on Vancouver Magazine's Power50 list from 2018 to ‘21. In 2023 she represented Canadian civil society at the United Nations 2nd Permanent Forum for People of African Descent.