Four friends set up Abusua Akoma to help people. None of them treated it as a project. Each of them took it as a calling.
What they had in common, looking back, was that they had come through whatever difficulty had been put in front of them — and that this had been most reliably true when what they were doing was for somebody else. That became the belief the Foundation runs on. The same spirit that carries a person through their own trouble is the one that draws hearts together, and the one that builds a community out of them. They did not think of that spirit as theirs. They took it as guidance.
The same spirit that carries a person through their own trouble is the one that builds a community.
The mark says this. Four hearts come together and make a community. Each heart is a person and the compassion they reach out with; the grid they close around is family — many small cells bound into one square. The hearts meet the grid rather than sitting beside it, because in this Foundation people and community are not two separate things.
The centre is left strong on purpose. Nyame Dua stands for the presence of God, for protection, and for a purpose larger than the people doing the work. That is what the middle of the mark holds, and it is the part the Foundation does not claim as its own.
There are four of most things in it. Nyame Dua is drawn as four arms around a centre. There are four hearts. The grid is not sixteen loose cells but four blocks of four, one sitting behind each heart, each nudged a fraction outward so the seams read. Four friends came first; nobody had matched them to the drawing until the drawing was finished.
The design was developed further by other relations, and it took several attempts to arrive at — early versions kept hollowing out the centre, or replacing the grid with solid blocks. Once the geometry was right it was locked, and every use since, from the cloth to the favicon of this page, is that one drawing rather than a new one.
