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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 financial investments and investments in community-based organizations. 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.
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 earned 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.
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