Over its more than thirty-three years, S.E.E.D.S. has conducted numerous projects and programs, including its Start–A–Library (S-A-L) Program, Crafts For Fair Exchange (CFFE), and its Pan African Communities Empowerment (PACE) Network with scores of community orgs, churches, professional associations, libraries, galleries, ad hoc groups and thousands of individuals. Again, these “S.E.E.D.S.” programs emphasized: (1) Service For Social & Political Change by average folks; (2) Liberatory Education & Literacy in local Black communities, Africa and across the African Diaspora; (3) Economic Justice & Development for Empowerment through "alternative" socio–economic development models (CFFE Empowerment and (4) Science for Sustainability through collaborations addressing our global African health & nutrition crises, as well as Pan African technology–transfer and resource sharing strategies. The Start–A–Library Program and CFFE are both much, much more than “feel-good” projects. Each offered a very easy opportunity for large numbers of people to find common ground upon which to mobilize. In each, we also address a glaring “immediate need” (literacy and economic empowerment, respectively) while specifically heightening Pan-African consciousness.

Founders

Both founders are lifelong learners, educators and community empowerment workers.

Jacqueline Wright
Co-Founder & Chairperson

Jacqueline has years of clerical experience; years of project management and senior management experience in public and private-sector workforce development; two decades of NYC public school teaching and teacher-coaching experience, and three decades of executive management experience in for-profit and not-for-profit companies.

She is also a certified fitness instructor, currently practicing in her local community center.

Jacqueline has an extensive international service and education travel log. She’s been to countries in East, Southern and West Africa, starting in 1985 when she worked as a coordinator in the UN Forum On Women Planning Committee Secretariat in NYC and Nairobi, Kenya with the Conference convener, Dame Nita Barrow of Barbados. Subsequently, she has traveled independently on international education service projects to Ghana, approximately 15 times; as well as to South Africa, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, mainland China, where she represented S.E.E.D.S. at the UN World Conference on Women in 1995. Two years later, she conducted cross-cultural research in multiple cities across Japan, staying in households, visiting schools and presenting in teacher development workshops. She has visited 2 of the 5 global rainforest canopies, in Ghana and Costa Rica respectively. In Costa Rica, she and fellow educators were able to learn firsthand, about the encroachment of vast coffee and banana plantations on its invaluable rainforest. Jacqueline has also traveled in Canada, the Caribbean and Europe.

Jacqueline earned a Bachelor of Science degree from SUNY Albany and holds Master’s degrees from Antioch University School of Law and Hunter College School of Education. .

Akinlabi Mackall
Co-founder & Director of Operations
akinmack@aol.com

Akinlabi E. A. Mackall is a longtime international community empowerment planner, worker, and organizer. He is also a co-founder of such education activist organizations as the Coalition for Public Education/Coalición por la Educación Pública (CPE/CEP) and the NYC Coalition to Finally End Mayoral Control 2022.

Akinlabi is a proponent of Pan African internationalist critical theory as a means, in the Black Radical Tradition, of locating protective pathways toward local-global Black liberation as a component of Human liberation. He has also identified intergenerational participatory action research (iPAR) to be a vital method of organizing the work of 21st Century Black liberation and Human liberation.