Nyia Hawkins

Impact Investment · Systems Changer · Storyteller

“We cannot use the same system that created the problems to solve them.” — Laina Greene, Business of Handmade

Nyia Hawkins is an impact strategist and advisor working at the intersection of economic power, ownership, and narrative. For more than twenty years, her work has been grounded in the same question: who has access to capital, who gets to decide where money goes, and who has to live with the result.

Through Cousin Futures, her advisory practice, she works with funders, impact investors, nonprofits, founders, and community leaders to address how capital is deployed, shaping investment criteria and funding strategies, assessing initiatives and the teams behind them, and structuring capital stacks that include grants, recoverable capital, debt, and non-extractive equity.

Nyia's career has spanned journalism, philanthropy, and impact investing. She spent most of two decades as a journalist, including a decade focused on global business and economics at CGTN. As Impact Strategist and Storyteller for the AmbitioUS initiative at the Center for Cultural Innovation, a time-limited pooled research and development fund bridging institutional funders, private philanthropy, and grassroots economic changemakers, she supported models advancing financial self-determination for artists, creative entrepreneurs, and cultural communities historically excluded from wealth-building. Across these roles, she built working fluency in catalytic capital, integrated capital stacks, CDFIs, and non-extractive finance — and a clear view of how capital either reproduces the status quo conditions or helps build something else.

Nyia was the creator, host, and producer of The Soul of Capital, a two-season podcast introducing listeners to alternative economic models and the changemakers building them, funded and owned by the Center for Cultural Innovation.

It is that whole arc—newsroom, fund, and practice—that she brings to Meridian Collective.

Nyia 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.