Jennifer Williams

As the CEO for Action for Racial Equity Fellow, Jennifer has co-led the pilot Place-based fellowship platform while also leading a team in the planning and creation of the Place-based toolkit/ guide to facilitate the execution of community mappings, city-specific data analysis/research, facilitation of stakeholder and community listening sessions and focus groups. She has trained a team of 10, including leadership, on Equity Design principles including design systems thinking and the development of equity solutions based on targeted universalism and positive deviance concepts. She has advised fellowship leadership on lived experience and interests of Black Oaklanders as a member of the Oakland Place-based Community Advisory Council, researched on over 200+ Bay Area organizations to distill preliminary top 5 racial equity priorities, led a team of 5 in the development of root cause hypotheses based on Oakland/Alameda County-specific data to be tested, and is co-designing listening sessions for Oakland grass tops organizations, community members, and local government to test and refine root cause hypotheses. In addition, she was the Leader of the Racial Equity in ESG fellowship solution: “Racial equity is ESG: What gets measured gets done.” She interviewed a variety stakeholder partners from former SEC council members, Big 4 accounting firms, and influencers of federal and state public policy, and synthesized ESG-related information from a variety of sources including webinars, academic journals, SEC ESG subcommittee proposed and final recommendations, public company financial statements, proxy statements, Page 1 of 5 federal and state legislation on several ESG-related topics including human capital, business diversity, climate-related disclosures. Jennifer designed the solution implementation plan to be executed by the fellowship and stakeholder partners, including building out of the solution timeline and criteria of success for each phase. She authored the solution policy memo aggregating information, insights, benefits and tactics for risk mitigation, and she is the ESG fellowship subject matter expert providing guidance to fellows whose signatory companies are interested stronger engagement on ESG-related racial equity strategies Economic Empowerment Leader in the fellowship SWAT Team. Jennifer analyzed agendas of over 10 national government entities and NGOs, identified economic empowerment trends to guide the strategic decisions on the fellowship solution portfolio Founder of the fellowship Black Community Council, and increased the fellowship’s practice of human-centered design principles in the successful advocacy for a fellowship Black Community Council (BCC) to represent the interests of our “customer”, the Black community. She provided successful nominations of BCC member, CEO of The Greenlining Institute Creator of the fellowship signatory racial equity initiative sentiment survey, and she coordinated with the fellowship Communications team in the creation of a sentiment survey to be completed by 100+ fellows across 100+ organizations.

Prior to her work with Action for Racial Equity Fellow, Jennifer had experiences with PwC’s Assurance Manager, Southwest Market Black Inclusion Network’s Co-Leader, and she worked on the Justice Project for PwC Impact Space – Northeastern University Civil Rights and Restorative, among many other experiences.