Ayo Roach
Ayo Roach launched her company GROW Philanthropies, a donor advisory and consulting firm, in 2018. She advises philanthropists, NPOs and NGOs in portfolio management, strategic planning, organizational development, and leadership strategy and is focused on developing solutions via a diversity/equity/inclusion (DEI) lens. She has subject area expertise in justice reform, environment and sustainability, indigenous peoples rights, reproductive health and justice, economic justice, civic engagement, youth-led activism, and the arts. She has extensive domestic and international grant making experience in the Caribbean and Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Middle East.
From 2005 to 2016, Ayo was Senior Philanthropy Associate and part of a four-person team in the David Rockefeller Family Office that managed DRs personal philanthropy. Her responsibilities ranged from program to grants management. At the David Rockefeller Fund, she worked closely with three generations of the family and managed and administered a grants portfolio that supported the Fund’s community, environment and sustainability, criminal justice, arts and activism programs.
Additionally, she directed the family and trustee giving portfolios. Prior to Ayo’s work in philanthropy, she worked in the entertainment, media, and tech industries in production, business development, marketing and distribution with companies such as Universal, Miramax, and Heavy.com. It is at this intersection of entertainment and philanthropy - the relationships she has cultivated along the way with producers, talent and creatives, funders and investors - where she as been able to bridge past experience with social justice, activism, and change.
She is currently a director at the New York Women’s Foundation (the largest public women’s foundation in the US), where she serves on the program and development committees. She is director and former co-president at the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls (a music, mentoring and empowerment program) and former chair of Soleil Global (an organization that is committed to ending energy poverty in Haiti). Ayo has a BA in History from Spelman College.