Episode Notes
In this episode, guest host Jasmine Reliford, a manager at Bridgespan, welcomes Rukaiyah Adams, a distinguished financier from Portland and CEO of 1803 Fund.
Listen as Rukaiyah talks about navigating her career and the challenges of investing in community wealth. Rukaiyah shares her reflections on the unique history of Portland's Albina neighborhood, the effects of systemic racism, and the importance of building a beloved community. Emphasizing the contributions and resilience of Black women, the conversation explores the creation of the 1803 Fund, a venture designed to empower Black Portlanders through strategic investment, advocacy, and inclusive planning. Rukaiyah also discusses the personal sacrifices and triumphs involved in leading such an initiative, underscoring the significance of collective achievement over individual success.
Episode Transcript
Darren Isom:
Welcome to Dreaming in Color, where we sit down with social change leaders of color to learn how their unique life experiences have prepared them to lead and drive the impact we all seek. I'm your host, Darren Isom. And this season, I'm lucky to have a few of my Bridgespan colleagues dropping in to join me as guest hosts. Together, we'll be celebrating the genius of leaders who live into the work every day. This is Dreaming in Color.
It's an absolute pleasure to present Jasmine Reliford, this episode's guest host, who brings an incredible wealth of knowledge, experience, and humor to today's conversation, into our Bridgespan community. Jasmine is a manager with me here in Bridgespan’s San Francisco office. Since joining in 2021, Jasmine has been a true force working with community-based organizations, movement organizations, nonprofits, and philanthropists on a variety of critical issues. Her expertise spans economic mobility, post-secondary education, gender justice, mental health, and intersectional approaches to systems change. Currently, she's at the helm of managing Bridgespan's long-term racial equity commitments, leading initiatives that are shaping the future for equitable communities. Without further ado, Jasmine, welcome to Dreaming in Color.
Jasmine Reliford:
Thanks, Darren. I'm Jasmine Reliford, and today I am chatting with the phenomenal Rukaiyah Adams. Rukaiyah is the CEO of the 1803 Fund, where she manages 400 million towards revitalizing Portland's historically Black neighborhoods, backed by Nike founder Phil Knight, and described as a private equity fund for the people, the 1803 Fund utilizes smart investments in community partnerships to restore Black Portland, the same community Rukaiyah's great-grandmother helped build after migrating from Louisiana during the Great Migration. Rukaiyah herself is a fourth-generation Portlander, and her love for the city is evident in her work. Before leading the 1803 Fund, she managed 800 million at the Meyer Memorial Trust, a Portland-based private fund that dedicates capital towards racial, social, and economic justice for the people of Oregon. Driven by the belief that we're all just trying to take care of one another, Rukaiyah's story exemplifies what deep commitment to community looks like in practice, and I'm so excited to be speaking with her today. Hello, Rukaiyah. Welcome. Welcome.
Rukaiyah Adams:
Hey, Jasmine.
Jasmine Reliford:
Why don't you kick us off with an invocation?
Rukaiyah Adams:
I have two. The first is Lucille Clifton, the poet, and the poem is called “why some people be mad at me sometimes.” “they ask me to remember / but they want me to remember / their memories and i keep on remembering mine.”They ask me to Remember, but they want me to remember / their memories / and I keep remembering / mine.” And then my second is Clementine Paddleford, and her quote is, "Don't grow a wishbone where your backbone ought to be."
Jasmine Reliford:
Ooh. I feel like what I know about you, too, those both are so on point, on brand. For sure. For sure. I actually don't know if you know this about me, but I did undergrad at the University of Washington, and my sister is an Oregon alum. So I am a very big fan of the Pacific Northwest.
Rukaiyah Adams:
We're in you then, huh? We're in you.
Jasmine Reliford:
Yes, always. And once you spend an extended amount of time there, you can't help but fall in love, like the greenery, the people, the food, all of that stuff. It's wonderful.
Rukaiyah Adams:
I feel like the Pacific Northwest is underrated, because I think people don't understand why we stay here. They see the rain and they think it's dreary. But for me, the energy of this place is about water in motion, falling from the sky, touching your body, moving through the water table. In the case of Portland, Portland's a river city, Seattle's a little different, but it flows into the river. And the rivers, we have rivers surrounding the city. Portland is at the confluence of two mighty rivers of the West, and every day, every Portlander sees water in motion and it reminds us to keep it moving, like don't get stuck. So the kinds of people who like the Pacific Northwest are “our flow energy” people.
Jasmine Reliford:
Ooh, I like that. And I'll say the point that you brought up in terms of staying, you are multi-generational staying in Portland. I wonder if you could share a little bit about your grandmother relocating to Portland and how the roots that you have with the city have shaped who you are and how you grew up.
Rukaiyah Adams:
Yeah. Jasmine, my great-grandmother moved to Portland, and at that time she was probably around my age actually and had her own children, and my grandmother, they moved here from Shreveport, Louisiana, in search of a place to build a beloved community. She was in the Jim Crow South, and some folks stayed and created what we know of as the modern Civil Rights Movement and other people expressed protest and power through migration. And my family was a part of that migratory story. They didn't intend to come to Portland, but they wanted to live in a place where they could build a community. And living in Shreveport, they fished the Red River, I don't know if you know Louisiana well, but fished the Red River. And my great-grandmother was an outdoors person and her daughters were very assertive and athletic people. And so the Willamette and the Columbia rivers ended up being a place that they could understand, a place that's deeply connected to a river system.
My grandmother went to work in the Garment District in Portland, which at the time was the second largest on the West Coast. And if you've ever visited Portland, it's the Pearl today in Portland. And they began to build this community of Black folks in Portland, helped to build a Black church here. So my family's been here. We have seven generations alive. I'm in the fourth of those seven. So just deep history and the ability to tell the truth about the place, even when that truth is not written in history books or recognized as Oregon history. I mean, Oregon is a state that had, it was one of the, I think it's the only state that had exclusion laws on the books when it entered the union. So Black people were excluded from the state, yet my great-grandmother came here. And so there's this rebuke of the historical narrative, that we were excluded yet the economy was dependent on Black-skilled labor, whether it was Black women who were seamstresses or Black men who were returning from the Korean War and were the shipbuilders that built the modern industrial economy in Portland.
So it's just a complicated story. For a long time in my adulthood, I wrestled with that history, Jasmine. I mean, as a Black American, do you really want to say you're from Portland? I mean, that doesn't work. At least I thought it just didn't feel right. I wanted to be from somewhere else and about somewhere else. But as I've gotten older, I've realized I am of this place. The most radical thing a person of African American descent can do is stake claim to a place. Because our history has been a history of movement, I wouldn't say itinerancy, but movement from coming to North America on slave ships and then moving around during slavery and then the Great Migration and now displacement and gentrification. There's just this constant flow. And to be in the first generation to say, "I'm not going anywhere, I'm not running anywhere, I'm not migrating. This belongs to me. It will belong to me for a hundred years. I am of this place," is a radical statement of Black liberation.
Jasmine Reliford:
And I'll also say, too, Portland or I know there's some other places that folks have grown up and they feel very similarly. Black people have been everywhere since the beginning.
Rukaiyah Adams:
Right.
Jasmine Reliford:
And we have history everywhere. And I think the beautiful thing particularly about Portland and your story is that you have a legacy of really crafting and cultivating the community there, particularly the BACH Community, which I just think is so beautiful. And we'll get into some of the work that you're currently doing on that regard. But I'm curious how the legacy that your great-grandmother set in terms of, I mean, I think that's radical. You moved to a new city, a predominantly white city, and you're like, "You know what? I'm not only going to move here and raise my family here. I'm going to really be a leader and a champion of creating a community here." How have those ideas of crafting a community and nourishing a community really shaped how you think about the world that you have in the world today of community and home and obligation to a place?
Rukaiyah Adams:
I did not intend to move back home. I mean, I left at 17 and was like, "This is Portland. I'm going to make my name in the big city." I lived in Minneapolis and Los Angeles and San Francisco and New York and really didn't intend to come back, but I had leave from this job that I had in New York and decided to come spend some time with my mom in Portland. And all of a sudden, the Venn diagram of educational attainment, knowledge of place and networks, they just snapped into alignment. And it was clear that I had an authority about this place that I didn't have in Harlem or in Oakland or in San Francisco. And it took me some time to work through what it meant to be the beneficiary of generations of people caring for me. Here's an example, Jasmine.
A lot of people don't know this, but after Brown v. Board of Education, some of the most progressive Black thinking and education was actually happening in Portland. So the Portland public school system didn't want to integrate schools with Black children to comply with the law. Instead, they were convinced. Derrick Bell was the dean of the law school here in Portland or in Oregon, and he was arriving for that job. And he testified before the school district and basically said, "We think Black children can achieve academic parity without integrating into white environments." So this is the '80s.
Jasmine Reliford:
Yup.
Rukaiyah Adams:
And I was lucky enough to be in the age group that entered into the schools at the time when they were trying to prove that Black children could achieve excellence in their own neighborhood schools. Now, the school district didn't want to integrate for racist reasons, but the people in our community wanted children to remain, they didn't want us to have to bus. So as a kid, I didn't have to bus out of my own community to receive an absolutely excellent education. So fast forward 40 years, the ones of us who went through school at that time when they were trying to prove the point that Black children don't need to be in white environments to be excellent. Well, those kids are now my age, and we have something to say about how all this stuff works. So getting back to your question about community, I know I'm a policy outcome, and some of those policies are racist, some of them are sexist, but some of them were fucking awesome. Oops, sorry, Jasmine. They were awesome.
Jasmine Reliford:
Safe space. You say whatever you need here.
Rukaiyah Adams:
Some of those policies were awesome and the educational policies that enabled us to achieve high levels of proficiency in our own communities, well now, it feels like this gift that it's taken me 40 years to open, and I'm determined to be a part of that work in the future. So I think of the work we're doing in improving the community and the physical format of the city as a love letter that generations of kids will open long into the future and know that I love them and the way that now I know how much I was loved in this place. So are we raggedy? Yeah. Were we broke? Absolutely. But was I loved? Yes. Was I strengthened? Yes. Was I encouraged to be Black? Yes. Could you tell me that as a little Black girl, I didn't have everything I needed to succeed? No, you couldn't tell me that. So, yeah. I feel like I got this beautiful gift of a beloved community that my great-grandmother and grandmother built and all these educators poured into me. And it feels like a privilege to continue it.
Jasmine Reliford:
Yeah. And almost, I mean, that obligation piece, right? It's hard to not feel compelled to continue that legacy and also to continue to pour into a community that poured into you and folks that you grew up with, your family, in such a beautiful way. I love that.
Rukaiyah Adams:
The other piece of it, I just remember when Hurricane Katrina happened and Louisiana was under water. And in that moment, I remember thinking that was where my family was, and this is where we are. And I remember thinking, "I hope that over the three generations since my great-grandmother," I'm in the fourth and here we are, "I hope we've made the kind of progress that she would be proud of." You seem too young to remember that experience, but there was this churning about whether the president loved Black people and those folks who were really desperate in Louisiana, how the government responded in support of them after the hurricane. And I just remember thinking about that imagery of being adjacent to the Red River and in Louisiana and my family now being adjacent to these powerful rivers in the West and the way that they overflow and thinking, I hope we've made the right choice. I hope so. There's no going back now.
Jasmine Reliford:
We're in it. We're in it. I do want to pivot a little bit, but in relation to community, you've spent pretty much all of your career in the world of capital markets, talking about capital investments, et cetera. You've been quoted saying, "I am an investor, not an activist," I should say. How do you think about community wealth?
Rukaiyah Adams:
Mm-hmm.
Jasmine Reliford:
There's obviously a capital number associated with that, but I think you've also named a lot of these other pieces of what could be considered wealthy and rich communities, but curious for your thoughts on that.
Rukaiyah Adams:
Yeah. Yeah. I am an investor, and I don't think any good investor today thinks only about the quantitative aspects of investing. If you are investing in private assets that have 10-year, 15-year contracts, new technologies, the adoption of those technologies and the scaling of them will be the next generation's work. And if you don't understand what matters to them, then you don't understand your investment. And so to me, a lot of the social issues that we often ascribe to social sciences are actually just good technical investing. But I'm thinking about capital deeply and financial capital and investing is just one category of capital. Black folks are rich in other forms of capital. We have a lot of creative capital. We'll create some stuff. We're creative people.
Jasmine Reliford:
We are the culture.
Rukaiyah Adams:
We are the culture. Right. And we also understand social capital in a way that other populations don't. And in a place like Portland or in Seattle, we are proximate to natural capital and have deep environmental commitment. There are some forms of capital that we haven't had enough of in order to have catalytic commonwealth. Financial capital is like the universal adapter. It allows you to convert creative capital into financial capital or convert community capital into financial capital. So we haven't had that catalytic capital and enough of it. And then there are forms of synthetic capital that we haven't had access to. And synthetic capital would be credit, for example. And so I'm thinking a lot about how we can use the forms of capital that we are rich in and my role in bringing financial capital to unlock more for all of us. But, Jasmine, I often think people who think about capital as money have never managed a billion dollars.
It is not money at that level. I say to people, it's money when you can imagine the amount piled up in single dollar bills on your dining room table. You can imagine a million dollars. You might be able to imagine $100 million, but it's really hard to conceive of what a billion dollars is. It becomes abstract. And at that point, it's energy. It's not actual, it's not money, and money is just a measure of energy. So what I've been trying to convey is that the work we're doing in building capital is really about how do we use our energy? We are energetic people. How do we use our energy to catalyze various forms of capital for our collective benefit? That's what we're up to.
Jasmine Reliford:
I'm curious about what you say to folks, even what you just named and described is considered, and I'll use, "Radical for some people," and when you're looking at other folks who are more in the camp of, "I can visually see the dollar bills of a billion dollars on a table versus these other forms of capital that are contributing to the value in the wealth of the community," how do you bring those folks along, your colleagues in the investment space who maybe have a short-term return view on some of their investments?
Rukaiyah Adams:
Yeah. I just outperform them. There's no moral, legal, rhetorical approach to it. You just have to be good and then have people ask the question, "Well, what is she doing? What is she thinking about? Who are our partners? How does that work?" And there's no other way to talk about it. It's a quantitative practice. You deliver the numbers and then a conversation will happen. And one of the hard things for me to accept in this role is that early on in my career judgment, I just really wanted to focus on the numbers. I wanted a more conventional set of expectations, a vacation house, a portfolio to manage, clear benchmarks, whatever. But what became clear after business school for me was, even if it wasn't verbal, anytime I walked into a room, there was a conversation about race and a conversation about gender happening. And there was no way that I could get out of that conversation.
Jasmine Reliford:
I mean, especially being a Black woman in finance on Wall Street/
Rukaiyah Adams:
Listen, girl, listen, the conversation's happening. So then about five years, I got to the point where I was like, "Well, if the conversation's going to happen, let me tell you what you're going to be talking about." And what you're going to be talking about is excellence. What you are going to be talking about is, how did she do it or who is that dot on the performance scale? And I just learned that you just got to be excellent, not rhetorically convincing.
Jasmine Reliford:
Well, one thing that I'm sitting with as you're saying this, is almost like your grandmother had, for lack of a better word, the audacity to move across the country and said, "You know what? I'm going to build something here and I know I can build something here." And the way that you're speaking about your career and even the things in the way that you grew up as well, it's very similar, you're like, "No, I how to build something. I can outperform folks." We just do excellence.
Rukaiyah Adams:
Yeah, you just be awesome. Yeah. Some of that is not voluntary, too, Jasmine. I want to not be too snappy about it. I learned to be excellent because I've been excluded from ease. I thought coming out of business school, I get one of the private equity jobs as a vice president and just be a deal girl. That's what I thought would happen. And instead, I've had to scrap and learn and build my own thing. And so the snappiness comes now because I’m building it, and I know that I can, but if you had talked to me 15 years ago, I would've been heartbroken. I would've felt very dispirited that based on my academic achievement and my experience that I hadn't had an easier path.
But now it's like, "Well, if I had been inculcated in those institutions, would I be thinking like this?" Probably not. One other thing, Jasmine, let's keep it real, real here. All of this institution building and deep thought took time, and there was a cost for it. We venerate the success without reckoning with the cost. I don't have children. I didn't get married until relatively later in life. And I don't regret any of that. It's not a “woe is me story.” It's more like, “whoa.” But we want Black women in particular to be superheroes, and we don't think about the personal cost that comes with that.
Jasmine Reliford:
The mental toll, too.
Rukaiyah Adams:
Listen, and trying to find the right partner as you're trying to build stuff and moving between cities. So it's really complicated. But with all that said, what a blessing it is at this point in my life to have my own fund, to have a workplace that's feminist as a Black feminist workplace, where people are not being harmed by HR policies or behavior, or Black women who are pregnant can take the time to bond with their children. And that I don't value them for their labor output. So I feel very lucky.
Jasmine Reliford:
Mm-hmm. I mean, and to go back to your water analogy, it's almost like your career has been this river that ebbs and flows. And I think the beautiful thing about water is it takes the shape of whatever you put it in.
Rukaiyah Adams:
Yeah.
Jasmine Reliford:
And in essence, I feel like that's kind of Black women. We are chameleons, we are able to navigate spaces that weren't for us and fit into the smallest, tiniest of cracks, but we're able to make something happen in spaces that didn't want us to be there in the first place.
Rukaiyah Adams:
That's right. And I think the challenge at this point in my career is to not get too comfortable at the privilege cookout. I feel like lately the message I'm getting is just enjoy the caviar. Just…
Jasmine Reliford:
I like that.
Rukaiyah Adams:
... enjoy it. It's not working for me for a couple of reasons. One, the caviar is not that great, and two, it doesn't work for a few tokens to do well if my brothers are not, right?
Jasmine Reliford:
Yeah.
Rukaiyah Adams:
That's the thing about being back in your hometown, you can be new money somewhere else. You can be new money bougie.
Jasmine Reliford:
People will remind you when you go home.
Rukaiyah Adams:
Exactly, girl. They will tell you…
Jasmine Reliford:
Yeah.
Rukaiyah Adams:
... "Uh-uh. Don't go there." And every day I'm reminded sometimes in the form of a rebuke, other times in forms of acceptance and other ways, I'm constantly reminded, "Hey, don't enjoy that caviar too much because we are in this together." So there's just this, I think, a theme that's happening for me in terms of realizing that my biggest commitment is togetherness and commonwealth. That's the thing that I can bring to it. I also think that being able to fit into spaces, the danger in that is there's a difference between freedom and liberation for us individually and collectively. And I think I've educated myself to freedom.
Jasmine Reliford:
How would you define freedom?
Rukaiyah Adams:
The ability to navigate in the existing system. You have some setbacks, but as a general rule, I can navigate our banking systems, our political systems, and on occasion, I'm reminded that people like me don't often do it. But more often, I have agency and power in this system now, right?
Jasmine Reliford:
Mm-hmm.
Rukaiyah Adams:
By virtue of class and education, a bunch of stuff. But if that system continues to oppress me and oppress again, my brothers, am I liberated in it?
Jasmine Reliford:
Mm-hmm.
Rukaiyah Adams:
And so the danger of it is to pursue freedom and not liberation.
Jasmine Reliford:
That makes sense.
Rukaiyah Adams:
Yeah. And liberation is a social enterprise.
Jasmine Reliford:
Say more about that.
Rukaiyah Adams:
I'm not sure that you can individually be liberated. Liberation is experienced in common. It's in gathering in the town square as Black people and have that not policed. It's in having Black children have opportunities to navigate an education system that actually educates them collectively. You experience liberation socially, not individually, not even in a marriage. It takes interaction and collective attainment to get there, not individual achievement. And this is where I think Black culture and the individualistic culture of American capitalism, our intention and being a capitalist, I'm holding that tension.
Jasmine Reliford:
Yeah. And I would say Black people, we are innately communal, especially Black women. I would say, we are a very matriarchal community where Black women are often carrying the stories from one generation to another, the values, the beliefs. And at the 1803 Fund, I feel like you're trying to build liberation. I'd love to get into all the specifics of that, but I love the story of how this fund started. So can you share a little bit about that?
Rukaiyah Adams:
Jasmine, I'm probably telling you more than I've said publicly, but I think I've been dreaming about this fund for 20 years. But about 10 years ago, we started the Albina vision work, and that was the planning for the historic Black community of Albina in Portland. And what I could see is we were doing advocacy work, and so much of that was interfacing with white-dominant institutions and having to appeal to things that would get those institutions to move or recognize us. But in the end, I thought, "This won't move unless there's capital and financial capital involved." As an investor, I just knew that was the case. So I started thinking about what will it really take to make that happen? Independent with that, two very amazing Portland leaders, Tony Hopson and Ron Herndon who have a relationship with Mr. Knight, were thinking about asking for funding for an education program or philanthropy.
And I am an alum of both those programs. And they came to me and said, "We're thinking about asking for this." And I was like, "That's not a big enough number. Ask for a bigger number." And so we came together, and together we formed the vision for the Albina Community Fund, worked with Bridgespan to write the business plan for that. And Mr. Knight ultimately decided to be an investor in building a community, not funding a program. And from there, we decided that I was likely the person to lead the work. Initially, I was like, "No, I'm happy being a CIO. I'm going to go back to my math games. Thank you. I'm going to go away." And Mr. Knight was a little bit more forceful with me and said, "No, I invest in people, and I can see that you are capable of doing this, and you need to step up. It's not enough for you to be perceived as powerful. Now, it's time for you to use your power. And you've been talking a lot, girl, it's time for you to walk," was essentially what he said.
And that's how it all started. 1803 recognizes the year that York, a slave, was assigned to the Lewis and Clark expedition. He was the navigator, a linguist, along with Sacagawea in native languages, and we didn't want to honor the year they arrived in Oregon. Because there were some complicated interfaces between Black men, in particular, the Buffalo Soldiers and other people and the native populations that were here. But can you imagine being York in 1803, a linguist, a navigator, a brilliant man gaining his freedom by leading this expedition westward and hoping to build a beloved community? Well, he did lead it, and they found the Oregon territories, but he was not granted his freedom. And so we think it's our work to realize the community that he envisioned.
Jasmine Reliford:
Mm-hmm. And that ties so nicely. I feel like you could wrap. We need to make a Netflix documentary about your family, about all of it, because it just ties so beautifully together.
Rukaiyah Adams:
I'm going to send you some pictures so you can see what these people actually look like. I have a lot of pictures of my great-grandmother and grandmother.
Jasmine Reliford:
Yeah. And it almost feels like destiny, like you were destined to be in this spot and to invest in the community and the way that you are. I love this.
Rukaiyah Adams:
Yeah. And I even think kind of the rough and tumble career twists and turns, tumbled me here with a clear enough view about the law, I was a lawyer for a decade, about how our capital markets work so that I could say to us, "Hey, this is the way. I know where the cookout is. That actually is not the way." The way is through collective attainment. And I also think the work I'm doing and, Jasmine, I'm not sure I can articulate this linearly yet. I'm still learning to talk about it, but people think it's about a physical place. And some of it is. We will build some buildings. We'll rename some streets. There's really important stuff to be done there. But really, this is a conversation about capitalism. One that Black women have been wanting to have for 500 years.
What I am saying is as the descendant of enslaved peoples, I carry in me wisdom about what it's like to be the original capital of the American colonies. We weren't collateral, we were capital. And the experience of 500 years of being an object in the system, and then in one generation making the jump to being a subject in control of billions of dollars, that's a big jump. And in that jump, I'm like, "Wait a minute. I carry all that wisdom with me." And so I have something to say about how we evolve and at this moment, lots of us are trying to figure it out. There's impact investing, there's mission investing, there's principles-based investing. People are trying to figure out how their money is impacting global geopolitical events.
We're all wrestling with this thing like, "How does this capitalist enterprise evolve? How am I participating in it? What do I have to say about where it heads?” And all of a sudden, it's clear to me that I have the power, the education, the networks, and maybe the wealth now to start to say things to this system about where it needs to go and it needs to head toward building wealth collectively for us. We don't want to blow up the whole system here at 1803. We're investors, conventional investors, but what we try to do is invest in ways that generate wealth for all of us, not just creating externalities for many, for the benefit of a few. That's what we're really up to.
Jasmine Reliford:
How do you go about building a team around you who also is walking the walk? And it almost was like Phil Knight said, "You know what? It has to be you." And so I'm curious, I feel like you probably selected folks on your team where you're like, "You know what? It also has to be you. You're coming along with me."
Rukaiyah Adams:
It was a combination of those. So it wasn't just Mr. Knight, it was those two men who ran the organizations who identified me, so them as well. And can you imagine the feminist statement they made there? Wow. Right? That we were talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. So that tells me our culture, even if it's patrilineal, is matrifocal, and hats off to the fellas for being feminist thinkers. So the first part in building a business, I think, successfully, is to understand yourself. And I knew right away that I knew what my weaknesses were. So my first hire was the person who runs our grant-making platform, a man who holds relationship deeply.
His superpower is interpersonal relations. He helps people feel loved and treasured and known and seen. I'm a quant. I want to communicate in an Excel spreadsheet. And I knew that I needed a relational partner in the work. So he was my first person. Then after that, I knew that I needed a thinker, and I hired a Black woman, a young Black woman, 30, to run our investment platform, who is a big brain, and she's got the big ovaries. She brings big ovary energy. And so she'll even push back on me and I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. You're going too far."
Jasmine Reliford:
Not [laughs] big ovary energy.
Rukaiyah Adams:
Big ovary energy. And so I knew I needed that kind of heady, pure intellect, and I needed the heart. And then we brought in people who execute in finance and operations. So it really started with self-knowledge. I am really good at strategy, at vision, at math. I needed someone to hold relationships and be technical. So that's where it started. And I would say, the thing I'm learning in starting a business, so in the past I've been on the capital side, so I threw money into new ventures and then walked away, and then a year came back and everything was set up and everything was fine. Starting a new venture is hard. It's really hard to do it when the spotlight of Phil Knight's universe is upon you. It's really hard when your community's hopes and dreams are thrown into you as a vessel. It's really hard to allow employees to be imperfect and amazing.
Things happen, garnishments, divorces, things happen. And in my prior job, I had a really simple responsibility. I had a pile of money and I needed to make it bigger. And this job, it's a much more complicated, emotionally demanding job. And my husband has been amazing in support of me. I have cousins who are executives around town, and they've been amazing in support of me. So I would say the third thing is, you got to have this constellation of support around you to make it happen. The other thing that's been really interesting is, we're trying to build 1803 as a Black wealth fund, not just financial wealth. And there's nothing for me to copy in the country. How does Black wealth talk and carry itself not in response to dominant culture? What if we are wealthy enough that we don't have to be reactive?
Jasmine Reliford:
Mm-hmm.
Rukaiyah Adams:
What does that mean? So much of the Black experience is this tense line between some kind of action and then our collective reaction. I mean, 2020 is a perfect example of that. So what happens if you cut that line? What are we thinking about? What does our brand look like? What would conversation between African Americans and the African continent look like if it weren't filtered or intermediated by institutions that disconnect us? So there's a lot of thinking about how do we do that and how is that reflected in our choices? Here's an example, Jasmine. So we will sponsor some events, and we sponsored an art event where Black art was on display, very exceptional stuff. And some of the art was wearable. And at the event, there were Black and brown people wearing the art, and the audience wasn't majority Black. So all of a sudden something that we thought was in support of Black art centered the white gaze upon Black bodies.
And it was jarring. And I realized, "Oh, uh-oh, we got this wrong." And so with every decision I make, I'm asking, "Who's the object and who's the subject here? Whose gaze are we centering? Who will benefit from this?" So it takes a thought that conventional investing doesn’t, and so we sort of made some early mistakes, and now I have a better sense of what Black wealth does. And what it does is it allows us to be together to gaze upon one another and to grow commonwealth together without the intermediation of institutions that are trying to take that away. And so I try to carry myself in that way. There are personal consequences, Jasmine. Like if I'm saying, "This is a Black feminist organization," how do I look? Do I color my grays to appear younger or desirable, or do I just hunker down into anti-energy? And there are all these personal consequences in how I carry myself, how I react socially, that I didn't anticipate.
Jasmine Reliford:
I think you touched a little bit on some of the values that are driving the work that you do. And I'm just curious if there are set, particularly from the ones of how you grew up in Portland that are influencing how you run your organization now, and how do you stay true to those values?
Rukaiyah Adams:
Yeah. Girl, listen. So that person I said I hired first who holds relationship, he will tug on my wig real fast. Real fast. When we were in that art event, he literally was like, "We didn't get this right." And so one way we stayed true to the values is that I tell the team, "You have to speak up." And one of our values is to be unapologetically Black. If your tuning fork is going on, you have to say something because we can correct it in the moment or change our approach, but I don't want to create an environment where there's a fear of being honest about integrity. So people say things, we are clear about what our values are, we're unapologetically Black, we are bold, we are assertive, we're human. And so it's simple. It's not complicated. What we're up to is not complicated. The big theory of change, Jasmine, is that Black people will do better if we work together. That's it. It's not rocket science. And so if I'm not doing that, girl, listen, the people on this team, uh-uh, and my mother?
Jasmine Reliford:
Going back to the fact you come home, people will tell you about yourself.
Rukaiyah Adams:
They sure will. I mean, it happens. I was in church a few years ago, and I was at the time the chair of the Oregon Investment Council, and we were investing, I think in TPG. I can't remember which fund it was, but they owned a mattress factory in town, and a lot of the employees at this factory were Black. Girl, I get a tap on my shoulder. Mrs. Johnson was like, "Hey, listen, I know you're on that board."
Jasmine Reliford:
I don't care about your fancy degrees, your pedigree.
Rukaiyah Adams:
Uh-uh. You better act like you got some sense. That's the thing about being in this community, you cannot hide, you cannot be artificial, you cannot shovel any bull. And even if people don't keep it real with you, the rain will keep it real. That rain will strip away any artifice or fancy. It strips it all away. So I'd say some of it is environmental, but I've also chosen to surround myself with people who love me enough and love “we” enough to keep it real.
Jasmine Reliford:
Those aunties will always tell you about yourself.
Rukaiyah Adams:
Right.
Jasmine Reliford:
Whether you ask for it or not.
Rukaiyah Adams:
Right. Don't nobody care what degrees I got. Nope.
Jasmine Reliford:
Let's talk about Rebuild Albina?
Rukaiyah Adams:
Albina is Latin for bright light. It sounds dignified, but it got his name because that was when Portland was stolen from natives and platted and handed out to the European settlers, the man who got that plot, his wife's name was Albina. What we know of as modern Portland today actually was three cities. Originally, Portland was west of the Willamette River. Albina hugged the Willamette River from Portland basically to the Columbia River. And then east of that was a city called East Portland. And at the turn of the 20th century, they became one city, and Albina was like the Ellis Island of Portland because it's the lowest point in the city. So the wealthy Westsiders lived in the hills above downtown, and then if you were a wealthy Eastsider, you lived in the hills on the east side, but there's a riverbed in between. And Albina was approximate to the river.
And so Black people live there because if the river flooded and it did flood a lot, then it was that neighborhood that got flooded. So usually, immigrants and migrants from other parts of the country landed in Albina and then moved to other parts of the city. After Albina was taken by eminent domain for the sports stadium and I-5 and a few hospital systems, they actually filled in that part of the city and lifted and leveled it 30 feet above the floodplain of the river to prevent the flooding of the river destroying the redeveloped community. So our first endeavor is to rebuild both the physical infrastructure, the built community, and also the physical community of what was historic Albina.
Jasmine Reliford:
By physical community, you mean?
Rukaiyah Adams:
Buildings, community centers. So there was a thriving Black and German community there at the time. It was acquired by eminent domain by the city to build what is the Trailblazer stadium today. And all around the stadium are parking lots, like surface level parking lots.
Jasmine Reliford:
We love to fill in some historically Black neighborhoods of this country.
Rukaiyah Adams:
We love doing that. And then I-5 came through and took up a whole section of it, but it used to be tens of thousands of homes. And we estimate that something like between half a million and a billion dollars of wealth was stolen from Black folks at that time. Some people's homes were taken, they got virtually no pay for it. So when people talk about Black communities looking poor here, it's mostly because we stole wealth two generations before. While most Americans were getting the benefit of the GI Bill, literally Black folks in Portland were having their wealth stolen from them. So, yes. We'll build some physical things, but again, it's the built community that we're working on. And the key to that, the theory of change, is we will do better if we achieve collective attainment.
Jasmine Reliford:
I was reading a study about the significant level of GDP that is not contributed to our economy because of the racial wealth gap. And I'm just like, "It just makes sense. If you look at the numbers, you should be investing in these communities because there is an opportunity for," and I don't want to sound again, too radical, “our collective liberation in that.”
Rukaiyah Adams:
I agree, but this is a really controversial topic, but I've given this talk publicly, so I'm not saying anything I haven't said already. But if you can think about slavery, not in the humanistic terms, but in business terms, fundamentally, it was a system where the labor, creativity, the creative capital, the human capital of a lot of people inured to the benefit of a few. And we did that through an ownership model. Well, fast forward to today, in many ways we've outlawed slavery and removed the moral stain. We now deliver the wealth of a lifetime of labor and creativity without actually having to own people. Now, we have a similar set of economic structures that achieve the same outcome. So the moral stain of ownership is gone. And so the real big challenge, again, I don't think that the challenge of transformation for our communities is in conversation with these systems that oppress us.
I think it's among us and figuring out how we work together to overcome those things. Because again, 500 years later, we still are not accumulating wealth. Our creativity is still inuring to the benefit of a very few. I continue to believe that the solution isn't only petitioning systems for regard or equal protection or citizenship. It's also empowering us together without the intermediation of systems that want to prevent us from doing that. That is the breakthrough. And I'm not sure it's the system. Again, I'm a capitalist. I think it's having more informed participants in it that can transform it.
Jasmine Reliford:
And when you think of what economic success looks like for Black people, is that how you would define it?
Rukaiyah Adams:
The success would be when our work, our creativity, our flow inures to the benefit of ourselves, our families, and our communities, in the simplest terms. And again, that's not just money.
Jasmine Reliford:
This season, we're highlighting mentors who've paved the way for all of our guests and impacted us as well as society at large. And so I'd love to hear if you have any call-outs for mentors or mentees who may have shaped who you are that have been really impactful in your life and career?
Rukaiyah Adams:
There are two people who stay with me. I had a Black dance professor in college named Mary Moore Easter. We studied Black movement, dances, liberation, theology. And at the time, it was to me a fluffy nontechnical course. But the grace that I tried to carry my body with sticks with me. So Mary Moore Easter, an amazing Black historian. And then a business school professor named Jeffrey Pfeffer. He teaches a class about power. Him imploring me to be powerful was probably one of the most catalytic engagements I've had in my life.
Jasmine Reliford:
What were some of the things he shared with you?
Rukaiyah Adams:
One of the things I remember him saying is that who you choose to partner with is probably your most important business decision. You'll not get to success if your husband's not willing to do the laundry. I remember him saying that to me. He also told me that you don't succeed in a workplace by avoiding what you perceive to be politics. That a lot of Black women in particular recoil from engaging in it. He's like, "You can't back down from it, because if you back out of it, then you lose." And I remember being really uncomfortable doing that, but I've learned that in a social environment, even if you find the politics distasteful, you can't not participate. And then his other point was that power doesn't come from a job title. It doesn't come from demography or gender. And that you need to understand how you, in your unique setting and your unique characteristics, can be powerful.
And when I was at a hedge fund, one way that I was powerful was that I was different. I didn't have children in expensive private schools in Connecticut, so I didn't have to follow all the rules that the guys who had partners who didn't work, and they had this huge operating expense load. I was living in Harlem, girl. I was doing just fine. Living my best life. And so I became an information node in that organization for the very reasons that people perceived me as being powerless. And so his lesson to me was, "Don't walk into a situation and say, you have no power. You need to understand what your power is." And I think that is the nugget of the 1803 work. I know what my power is, and I'm going to use it.
Jasmine Reliford:
I strive to be so comfortable in taking up the space that I deserve. In what you've described in our conversation, I feel like I'm like, "All right. I could do this. I could take on the world." Because I think you are just so thoughtful in all the decisions that you've made. And so I love the assuredness that I hope to one day also have.
Rukaiyah Adams:
Middle age is amazing, Jasmine. Listen, girl, clarity, you get to clarity above 45, the world is like, "No, actually I know what's happening."
Jasmine Reliford:
Well that, and I'm like, Rukaiyah needs to be my life coach, because if I had a conversation like this with you once a month, I’d feel like, "Let me see what I can take over because we're out here doing it all for sure."
Rukaiyah Adams:
You are so dope. So listen, your energy is jumping through even this platform. I can feel it. And what I get the sense from you is, that you don't actually have to take on the world. You just walk with intention and your path will clear. You're that loved. You are that powerful.
Jasmine Reliford:
Oh.
Rukaiyah Adams:
You don't even have to fight.
Jasmine Reliford:
I will take that. I will take that. Yes. Yes. This will be my last question. So if you had to choose a walk-up song, you're walking up on a stage and this is a song they played, what song would it be?
Rukaiyah Adams:
I think I would choose one of the Tribe songs, any one of them.
Jasmine Reliford:
I always love speaking with Rukaiyah. It's hard not to feel the multi-dimensions of her being: colleague, auntie, mentor, friend, daughter. To me, an inspiration and definitely a “radical thinker” to some. Yet it's hard for me not to describe the Black women in my life as radical, especially the generations of Black women in my family who came before me. My paternal grandmother was a single mom who raised my dad and aunt working four jobs, as my dad likes to remind me to move her family to a safer neighborhood than the offerings of the Newark riots in the 1960s. My maternal great-grandmother, she was born and raised in Nashville and was the first in her family to own property and run a business. She shared what she earned with the community around her by providing food and sanctuary. "The best catering business in town," my grandmother would say.
The Black women I come from, they didn't have imposter syndrome, for imposter syndrome does not fully capture the experiences of those who occupy spaces that were deliberately designed to keep us out in the first place. As both of our great-grandmothers did generations before, Rukaiyah is doing something that is quintessentially a Black woman tendency. When there isn't a seat at the table, we bring enough folding chairs for our whole family and communities to sit down to. This spaciousness, just as the flowing rivers Rukaiyah described, is the ultimate reminder that we are our ancestors' wildest dreams, and for so many of us, myself included, those dreams manifested in the communities we call home. So thanks for listening, y’all. I hope you feel empowered to take up the space you deserve, even if it's one droplet at a time.
Darren Isom:
This season, we're putting some music with the magic and have collected the theme songs from all of our guests and collaborators to create a Spotify playlist for our listeners to enjoy. Find it on Spotify under “Dreaming in Color: The Playlist.” Thanks for listening to Dreaming in Color. A special shout-out to all the folks who make this magic happen. From StudioPod Media, our wonderful producer, Denise Savas, audio engineer, Teresa Buchanan, and graphic designer, Diana Jimenez. And from Reel Works, our video production team, Jenny Loo and Stephen Czaja. A huge shoutout to our ever brilliant Bridgespan production team: Cora Daniels, Christian Celeste Tate, Christina Pistorius, Ryan Wenzel, and this season's guest hosts, Jasmine Reliford, Nithya Iyengar, and Angela Maldonado. And of course, our fabulous creative director, Ami Diané. What a squad, y’all. Be sure to rate, subscribe, and review wherever you listen to podcasts. Catch you next time.
