Rukaiyah Adams

Since January 2023, Rukaiyah Adams has served as the Chief Executive Officer of the 1803 Fund. The 1803 Fund seeks to grow shared prosperity, through the alignment of financial investments and investments in community-based organizations. It is not a conventional investment firm, and it is not traditional philanthropy—the work of the 1803 Fund includes aspects of both. The professionals that work with Rukaiyah describe the work as ‘investing for the people’.

Through August 2022, Ms. Adams was the Chief Investment Officer at Meyer Memorial Trust, one of the largest charitable trusts in the Pacific Northwest. She was responsible for leading all investment activities to ensure the long-term financial strength of the organization. Throughout her tenure as CIO, Ms. Adams consistently delivered top quartile performance. Under her leadership, Meyer increased assets managed by diverse managers by more than 3x and assets managed by women managers increased by 10x, proving that hiring diverse managers is not a concessionary practice.

Ms. Adams’ team has been at the forefront of socially responsible investing, including crafting language to describe the nascent practice. She devised and wrote the field-leading concepts for social responsibility in the “affirmative covenant” investment framework and for diversity, equity and inclusion in the “people, products and shared prosperity” framework.

Before joining Meyer, Ms. Adams ran the $6.5 billion capital markets fund at The Standard, then a publicly-traded company. At The Standard, she oversaw trading desks that included bond strategies, preferred equities, derivatives and other risk mitigation strategies.

From 2017-2020 Ms. Adams was chair of the prestigious Oregon Investment Council, the board that manages approximately $100 billion of public pension and other assets for the State of Oregon. During her tenure as chair, the Oregon state pension fund was among the top-performing public pension funds in the United States. The top-of-class performance was made possible by a series of strategic changes overseen by Ms. Adams that boosted returns and decreased risk.

Ms. Adams serves on the boards of the Albina Vision Trust, the Self Enhancement, Inc. Foundation, Oregon Health and Science University Foundation, and Oregon Public Broadcasting, where she is also the current chair. She also serves on the Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission.

She has engaged in pro bono legal work on behalf of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, the Homeless Prenatal Program in San Francisco, and the Children’s Defense Fund.

She has given two Ted talks. Her 2016 Ted talk — A Homegirl’s Guide to Being Powerful — about her path to becoming a more thoughtful investor and the role of investment capital in achieving social justice has more than 14,000 views.

Ms. Adams holds a Bachelor of Arts with academic distinction from Carleton College, a Juris Doctor from Stanford Law School, where she was on the Law and Policy Review and the Co-President of the Law Student Association, and a Master of Business Administration from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.