11. SUSTAINABLE CITIES AND COMMUNITIES

A Black Woman in Finance’s Path to Success – Morgan Stanley

Written by Amanda

Grace Chionuma’s family has always prized education. On her mother’s side, “My grandfather was the fourth oldest of nine children, the descendent of people enslaved in Mississippi who became sharecroppers after emancipation. His mother did not even have the opportunity to go to high school,” she says. “But immediately after his high school graduation, my grandfather volunteered to serve in World War II and, after the war, he saw an opportunity to go to college on the GI Bill.”

Crawford J. Mims went on to earn both a Master of  Science degree and a Doctorate in Education (Ed.D.), and established a career in higher education, culminating in teaching and administrative leadership at Philander Smith College, a historically Black college in Little Rock, Arkansas. “He dedicated his life to education,” says Chionuma. Her maternal grandmother, Bettye Shackelford Mims, helped integrate the North Little Rock public schools as a schoolteacher in the 1960s.

Chionuma’s father, meanwhile, came to the U.S. to go to college, after the civil war in his native Nigeria. He landed at the very same college where her grandfather taught. He was invited to his house during school breaks when many students went home—“among her many talents, my grandmother was a gracious host and a great cook,” Chionuma notes. At one of these gatherings, he met the professor’s daughter. He later married her on his way to becoming a medical doctor. Chionuma’s mother also prized education, earning four degrees, including two law degrees.

Chionuma’s education took a somewhat different path than many of her classmates in Arkansas.  At age 13, she had the opportunity to attend boarding school at Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts. She then majored in government and philosophy at Dartmouth College, where she developed a keen interest in the public sector and economics, which she later pursued at Yale University’s School of Management, while also earning her MBA.

Wall Street may be a long way from Little Rock, but Chionuma found the guidance she needed to get there from an organization called the Toigo Foundation , which identifies promising business school students of color and prepares them for careers in the finance industry. Not only does Toigo, which Morgan Stanley partners with, pay for fellows like Chionuma to earn their MBAs, “It shares information, networks, experiences and strategies about financial services with groups of people who historically have been underrepresented in that industry. And that’s exactly who I was,” says Chionuma. “The program was invaluable to me.”

Source: morganstanley.com

About the author

Amanda

Hi there, I am Amanda and I work as an editor at impactinvesting.ai;  if you are interested in my services, please reach me at amanda.impactinvesting.ai