Ayeola Fortune
Board Member
- Email:[email protected]
- Hometown:Columbia, MD
Ayeola Fortune is the Vice President of Impact Programs at United Way Worldwide. She provides oversight, strategic guidance, and support to team members managing key initiatives in education, economic mobility, and health. She leads UWW’s efforts to support local United Ways to integrate equity into their impact work by developing frameworks, strategies, peer learning and training opportunities, and developing resources and tools. She also leads UWW’s efforts to collect and aggregate data from local United Ways’ to demonstrate collective impact across communities via the Global Results Framework.
Previously, as Senior Director of Global Impact and Results, Ayeola led the initial development of the Global Results Framework, and efforts to build United Way Network capacity to advance impact in their communities. This includes the development of United Way’s Equity Framework which articulates the levers United Ways can implement to advance their work in community focused on closing persistent gaps and disparities, and related learning opportunities. As Director of Youth Success, Ayeola developed strategies, resources, and tools and led major initiatives to build network capacity to improve the number of students that graduate high school prepared for college and career. This included grants focused on out-of-school time, middle grades success, and post-secondary completion, as well as United Way Worldwide’ s Ready by 21 National Partnership. She also helped lead the development of United Way’s education roadmaps which outlined the critical strategies, implementation approaches and potential roles that United Ways can play to improve educational outcomes, especially for at-risk youth, in their communities.
Before joining UWW, Ayeola served as the director of extended learning opportunities and development Project at the Council of Chief State School Officers from 2001-2009. In this role, she developed proposals to support Council activities based on identified state education agency needs relative to implementing federal policy initiatives. Preceding this role, Ayeola was a high school teacher at The Ellis School in Pittsburgh, PA.
Ayeola earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Government from Lehigh University, as well as a Master of Arts in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh.