Rukaiyah Adams, chief investment officer at Portland’s Meyer Memorial Trust - doing good and investing well
The $90 billion dollar Oregon Pension ranks among the top fifteen in the US, but how many in the industry know the current board chair, Ms. Rukaiyah Adams?
Ms. Adams was born in Berkeley, CA, grew up in diverse, northeast Portland, and returned to her home city after a stellar legal and investment career in California and New York.
She splits her professional duties between the $750 million AUM Meyer Memorial Trust, where she is chief investment officer and the $90 billion Oregon Investment Council, where she is board chairperson.
Present day Portland is a little easier to reach than it was when President Thomas Jefferson sent Captain Lewis, Second Lieutenant Clark, and the ‘Corps of Discovery” west to explore the vast uncharted American territories.
Still, Portland is not Wall Street and, at the west end of the Oregon Trail, just far enough off the beaten track to feel a bit isolated.
Yet, the state is home to the Oregon Investment Council, one of the nation’s largest pension funds, several well-run university endowments, three first-rate investment consulting firms, and the Meyer Memorial Trust, established with a bequest from Mr. Fred G. Meyer, a twentieth century supermarket magnate.
When Mr. Meyer died in 1978 at the age of 92, he left two million shares of stock to the newly formed foundation. And thanks to a buy-out deal in the early days of private equity, the value of the trust’s holdings soared. KKR and the Oregon Investment Council, in one of their first joint buyout forays, purchased the Fred Meyer Co. in 1981, which did wonders for the stock.
Ms. Rukaiyah Adams joined the foundation as investment head about four years ago, after managing a $7bn fixed income and derivatives fund for The Standard, a Portland-based financial services company.
We caught up with Ms. Adams earlier this year and wondered what the investment view looked like from her outpost on the Pacific rim.
Ironically, with only a handful of African-American chief investment officers in the entire US, the progressive northwest has two, Ms. Adams, a Portland native, and Joseph Boateng, from Ghana originally, and the long-serving investment head of Casey Family Programs in Seattle, the largest non-government provider of foster care in the country.
We wanted to know what drew her to the asset management industry, her views on investing, and what advice she might have to offer to encourage more women and minorities to get into the business.
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