Business Women Awards 2022
Technical Services Woman to Watch Nishita Roy-Pope, Tribe Academy LLC
Nishita Roy-Pope has been drawn to the concept of interconnectedness.
“I’ve always been very globally minded,” she said. “As the child of immigrants, I’m proud of my Indian heritage and international influences.”
Roy-Pope’s undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University in international politics and international relations was an effort to understand how global processes interact with one another, with study-abroad opportunities as part of that experience.
Cultural immersion offers a perspective on diversity that many don’t experience. Roy-Pope traveled to Cairo, Egypt, to better know an often-misunderstood region, and then to China, as part of her MBA studies at Texas A&M University.
“The China trip helped me to see how it was critical to our global economy,” she said. “It helped me see how international markets work and how the economy here would be driven by these emerging countries.”
Since then, Roy-Pope has racked up a sizeable number of awards in diversity project recognition and community leadership. Her career has spanned areas of marketing, communications and recruiting.
With her love of all things international, diverse and multicultural, all roads led to Tribe Academy LLC in North Kingstown, a passion project that Roy-Pope started with co-founder Florcy Morisset in 2019. The organization stemmed from her talent diversity work in technology, she says, and work to accelerate the inclusion of traditionally underrepresented racial and cultural backgrounds in the worlds of business and STEM sectors, which include science, technology, engineering and math.
Tribe Academy brings together professionals of color with mentors, champions and coaches from companies such as Nike Inc., Tableau Software, Fidelity Investments Inc., CyberArk, Salesforce Inc. and Audible.
Companies that have trouble attracting a diverse workforce rely on Tribe Academy, which also helps them attract more diverse customers in the process, a beneficial end result.
“We tend to gravitate toward people like us,” Roy-Pope said. “As organizations, if we are homogeneous – if the starting point is not diverse – it’s harder to get there.”
Where the past decade has been one of connecting, leadership and diversity, Roy-Pope looks forward to more mission-based work.