Allen Kwabena Frimpong is urban planner and a conceptual artist engaged in cultural design centering cooperative development. He is a founder of several influential social entrepreneurship endeavors.

Currently, he is a co-founder and principal cultural designer with ZEAL (www.zeal.coop), a worker owned studio alliance for Black artists throughout the diaspora. ZEAL is most known for its critically acclaimed pop-up exhibition “Who Owns Black Art?” during Miami Art Basel 2019-2022 which has been featured in the New York Times, ABC Nightline, and Hyperallergic to name a few. As a conceptual artist he designs and produces public art installations and multimedia anthologies.

He was a managing partner of AdAstra Collective (www.adastra.management) which is a boutique consulting cooperative that grew out of the social movement think & do tank Movement NetLab whose vision is to transform power through networked movement building for a just, democratic, and liberating world. AdAstra Collective also anchored the work of the Old Money, New System community of practice 2016-2020 (www.oldmoneynewsystem.net) that popularized social movement resource mobilization and participatory grant-making as concepts through initiatives like (i.e. Solidaire, Wealth Reclamation Academy of Practictioners, Thousand Currents, Movement 4 Black Lives, Climate Justice Alliance, Justice Funders, Libra Foundation) in a just transition that strengthened social movement ecosystems to be relational, center community healing, solidarity, and reparations in the redistribution of wealth in philanthropy towards investing in solidarity economy through learning and innovation.

Lastly, he co-founded Liberation Ventures and was a former Senior Fellow at PolicyLink, creating a field-building organization building a culture of repair towards winning on reparations in the US.

Allen has supported the capacity-building of many organizational efforts over the last 20 years with a unique interdisciplinary practice in community organizing, cultural strategy, transformative leadership advising, resource mobilization, and participatory planning within networked complex systems of communities. He is also the current board chair of one of the oldest social movement public foundations in the US, Resist.

Allen Kwabena Frimpong has a master's degree in Urban Planning and Affairs from CUNY Hunter College and graduate certifications from the UPenn School of Social Policy in the Executive Program on Arts and Cultural Strategy as well as the Center for Popular Economics at Amherst College. He also studied at the New York City Jazz Workshop.