Ajamu KitwanaVP/Director, Community Impact
As VP/Director, Community Impact, Ajamu supports ESL’s mission to share our financial success and reinvest in our community. Ajamu leads ESL’s Community Impact team and its commitment to collaboration to build a healthy, resilient, and equitable Greater Rochester community. To achieve this vision, Ajamu and the Community Impact team manage key initiatives of expanding individual opportunity, building strong neighborhoods, and strengthening organizations and systems. Ajamu also oversees the ESL Charitable Foundation as its Executive Director. The Foundation provides grants to many community initiatives driving meaningful and measurable change in the Great Rochester area.
Ajamu originally joined ESL Federal Credit Union in fall 2013 as the manager of the new ESL Consumer Prosperity Program, established to enhance community solutions for financial inclusion. In January 2016, Ajamu was promoted to Executive Director of the ESL Charitable Foundation (Foundation), and to Vice President in 2018.
Prior to joining ESL, Ajamu was a consultant with FSG Social Impact Advisors. There his work included engaging Dallas stakeholders in a collective impact effort to reduce community-wide costs of pediatric asthma and guiding Ohio corporate, philanthropic, and academic leaders in collaboration for regional economic competitiveness. He also worked for several organizations committed to shared value and/or social justice, including the Make It Right Foundation, an organization founded by Brad Pitt and committed to rebuilding neighborhoods in New Orleans devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
Ajamu received a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and holds both his Bachelor and Master of Science Degrees in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University. He presently serves on the WXXI Board of Trustees. Ajamu resides in Rochester with his wife and their three children.