Ifeoma (EE-pho-ma) Ike (EE-Kay) is a renowned human and civil rights lawyer, author and strategist whose career centers on two things: designing pathways to equity and helping leaders problem solve through an equity lens.
She is the Founder of Chief Equity Weaver of the award-winning consultancy Pink Cornrows, which partly supports how corporate, political, and nonprofit organizations better achieve internal and external equity, diversity, and social impact goals. Ifeoma is the author of the bestselling #1 new release, “The Equity Mindset,” which she describes as “the pocket thought partner for the person tired of just talking about change.”
She is an NYU McSilver Institute Resident Fellow and a Pioneering Ideas Grantee with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for her groundbreaking Radical Sabbatical project. Ifeoma is also the interim Director of Policy and Advocacy for the Black Innovation Alliance. From the White House to Morocco, Ifeoma is a behind the scenes player on a mission to equip today’s leaders with the insights, toolbox and motivation to address our most challenging issues.
Growing up as a disabled, poor, first-generation girl in Trenton, NJ–and subsequently pursuing her undergrad and grad studies as a Storer Scholar at West Virginia University–definitely shaped Ifeoma’s working philosophy that equity must be urgent, solve something, and not be left to one person to fix. Creating the motto “the future is equity,” Ifeoma has sprinkled “good trouble” in quite a few spaces: she helped advance criminal justice reform bills as a senior policy advocate for the Innocence Project; Ifeoma is the brainchild of three policy caucuses on Capitol Hill, including the recently launched Congressional Black Innovation Caucus; she advocated for and co-drafted New York City’s first-ever equity executive order, requiring agencies to collect essential data to serve communities better; and she designed one of the nation’s leading teacher diversity programs–NYC Men Teach.
She was tapped to co-lead the Public Advocate’s Office’s transition committee–the second-highest executive office in NYC. A few years later, that office recommended Ifeoma to its first appointee to the City of New York’s Conflict of Interest Board. A data-informed, human-centered library of impact includes supporting leaders at Fortune 500 companies such as Bloomberg, Expedia and Mastercard; conducting research for socially-conscious philanthropic leaders, including the Langeloth Foundation, Ms. Foundation and Ford Foundation; and co-designing pipelines to increase diversity representation and leadership, including collaborating with the late fashion designer Virgil Abloh and the Fashion Scholarship Fund to create the Post Modern Fellowship–now a leading future of work strategy disrupting the field of fashion and retail.
Ifeoma’s team was selected by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Equity Vaccination Initiative during the global pandemic to lead how community advocates, data technologists, researchers, and communications specialists work together to ensure equitable healthcare information and resource distribution with dignity and respect. She is also the visionary behind the annual gathering, Black Policy Lab, an accessible convening bridging the gap between communities, changemakers, and experts.
She has served on the board of the Women’s Prison Association, the Nigerian Healthcare Foundation, and the National Black Law Students Association, among others. She has provided pro bono support in Haiti, in her backyard in Brooklyn, and as part of high-profile movements, including as a Ferguson Legal Defense Committee member. Ifeoma has been a guest lecturer at several institutions, including Cornell, Yale, and Harvard, and has been on several media outlets, including MSNBC, CNN, HuffPost, HBO, and Vanity Fair.
