Andrea L. Taylor is Director of North America Community Affairs for Microsoft Corporation. Since 2006 she has managed the team that implements Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential program to advance employability and workforce development in the U.S. and Canada; employee community engagement programs including matching gifts and volunteering; and Puget Sound community engagement. She works closely with nonprofit organizations, government and business to develop partnerships to further the goals and help create social and economic opportunities that can transform communities and help people to realize their potential.
Ms. Taylor served as Director of the Global Media Program at the Ford Foundation for nearly a decade through1996, managing a $50 million grant portfolio that included award-winning series produced for PBS, NPR, and the BBC such as “Eyes on the Prize” created by Henry Hampton. She later established A. H. Brown Enterprises, LLC. In NYC and co-directed the Institute on the Arts & Civic Dialogue at Harvard University. During the dot.com era she was co-founder of Davis Creek Capital, an early stage investment group for minority and women-owned businesses,
Later she became president of the Benton Foundation, a Washington, DC based public interest media group. In 2004, as a Vice President at Education Development Center, a Boston-based non-profit, she was an outspoken advocate for eliminating the “digital divide.” She also was appointed to the Adjunct Faculty at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education to develop and teach a new course on New Media in 2005-2006. She was a delegate to four United Nations Conferences between 1994 - 2005: International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo), Women’s Conference (Beijing); and the World Summits on the Information Society (Geneva & Tunis).
She serves on the boards of Boston University, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, Philanthropy Northwest and WNYC Public Radio. She is a member of the Visiting Committee of the Evans School of Public Policy at University of Washington, the Advisory Board of the Center for Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship at Columbia University, Council Associates (former board members of the Council on Foundations), and the Della Hardman Day Committee that organizes the annual cultural events in memory of her mother sponsored by the Town of Oak Bluffs.
A native of Cambridge, Massachusetts, she is the great granddaughter of slaves from Virginia and West Virginia with roots in Ghana. She graduated from Charleston High School after her parents moved back to the region during the first year of school desegregation. As a student, she participated in the1963 March on Washington along with the WV delegation, an experience that also helped to shape her commitment to human and civil rights issues. Ms. Taylor earned her B.S. in Journalism from Boston University in 1968 and later pursued post-graduate studies in International Relations at New York University. In 2008 she received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Boston University.
In November 2009, she completed the 40th anniversary New York City Marathon. She has three adult children, Wole C. Coaxum, Senior Vice President, JPMorgan Chase, Kamara A. Coaxum, teacher, International School of Beijing, and Kofi S. Coaxum, Morehouse College, Class of 2009, and three grandchildren.