Adaku Utah

Hailing from Nigeria, Adaku Utah is an Igbo Queer teacher, organizer, healer and ritual artist committed to cultivating movements that are strategic, sustainable and mutually nourishing.  

For over twenty years, her work has centered in movements for radical social change, with a focus on gender, reproductive, race, youth and healing justice.  She has taught and organized both nationally and internationally with organizations like the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, Black Lives Matter, Black LGBTQI+ Migrant Project, The Movement for Black Lives, Yale University, Planned Parenthood, Astraea Foundation, Black Women’s Blueprint, the Audre Lorde Project and more. 

Alongside Harriet Tubman,  she is  the co-founder and co-director of Harriet's Apothecary, a healing village led by Black Cis Women, Queer and Trans healers, artists, and organizers committed to living out Harriet Tubman's legacy of centering healing, wellness, and safety as movement building strategies  to deconstruct legacies of trauma and galvanize communities to shape generative transformation. 



She is currently the Organizing Director at the National Network of Abortion Funds where she plays a key role as a strategist, innovator, and implementer, building and mobilizing the left-flank organizing power and movement building efforts with 70+ member organizations, individual members, and network leaders across the country and world.

Adaku teaches and coaches with BOLD (Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity), a national leadership training program designed to help rebuild Black social justice infrastructure in order 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

She has been recognized as a 2020 Laundromat Project Community Impact Honoree, a 2017 Essence Magazine Woke 100 Change Maker and is a recipient of the 2017 Gye Nyame Empowerment Project My Sister's Keeper Award, the 2015 Blade of Grass Fellowship,  the 2015 Laundromat Project Create Change Fellowship and the 2012 Sexuality Leadership Development Fellowship with the Africa Regional Sexuality Resource Centre in Lagos, Nigeria. Adaku proudly served as a founding board member of Soul Fire Farm for the last 6 years as a commitment to ending the racism and injustice in the food system.  In her spare time, she loves nerding out about astrology, herbs, erotica, and sci-fi.