Rakiba Kibria is a lifelong learner, a mom, a partner, a daughter, and a plant lover. She comes from a lineage of refugees, liberation fighters, community organizers, educators, and farmers.
Rakiba has tough love for the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors, which have been her professional home for over 13 years. The majority of her career has been as a fundraiser for human services nonprofits in NYC focused on young people.
Through her work, she intimately understands the challenges small and large social sector organizations face and are often ill-equipped to solve due to a lack of diverse leadership, informed programming from communities most impacted, and approaching problems from a dominant worldview and scarcity mindset. At Common Future, she leads the Revenue team to fundraise for community-led economic solutions created by/for/with BIPOC leaders on the ground.
Rakiba is a big believer in the quadruple bottom line: people, planet, equity, and profit. She believes philanthropy and impact investing have the power and responsibility to remedy centuries of extraction, exploitation, and harm suffered by marginalized communities and our planet. It is through trusted relationships in the social sector we can begin to radically reimagine solutions to the problems plaguing our communities by taking risks, catalyzing change, and accelerating and incentivizing impact over profit.
She is a first-gen Bangladeshi American with strong Queens, NYC pride. Rakiba holds a B.A. from American University in International Development and Economics and an M.S. from Columbia University in Nonprofit Management — where she was also an Associate Instructor for the program.