Jacqueline Adams
Jacqueline Adams launched a second career as a communications strategist after more than two decades as an Emmy Award winning CBS News correspondent. A natural “connector,” she has the unique ability to hear clients’ strategic concerns and find creative solutions, drawing upon her wealth of contacts and experiences in media, business, academic and civic circles.
Through her boutique consulting firm, J Adams: Strategic Communications, LLC, she counsels a variety of corporate and non-profit clients. She has had multi-year engagements with the global communications strategy firm then known as Burson-Marsteller, and with the Ford Foundation. She serves as a senior advisor to the new payment platform for publishers, NICKLPass and she is a co-founder of the training program for rising star managers of color, The Diverse Future. In 2020, she launched a bi-monthly column, #TeamUp, in The Christian Science Monitor, following the publication of the book she co-authored, “A Blessing: Women of Color Teaming Up to Lead, Empower and Thrive.” She currently writes the Climate Stories blog for the Harvard Business School Business and the Environment Initiative.
At CBS News, Ms. Adams covered the groundbreaking campaigns of Jesse Jackson for President and Geraldine Ferraro for Vice President before spending five years as a White House correspondent during the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. In the 1990s, she was a prolific contributor to the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather and CBS News Sunday Morning. She won a News and Documentary Emmy Award for the 48 Hours broadcast, “The Search for Matthew.”
A graduate of Harvard Business School, Ms. Adams deliberately saves time for a number of non-profit activities in the arts, education and foreign policy sectors. Currently, she serves on the Board of Directors of the Harvard Business School Club of New York and was among the alumnae profiled during the school’s 50th anniversary celebrations of women and African-American students . She recently retired as communications officer of the Harvard Business School African-American Alumni Association (HBSAAA) after 20 years of service.
She has served on the boards of NYC Global Partners during the Bloomberg administration and the Off-the-Record Lecture Series, the oldest, largest women’s foreign policy lecture series in the United States. For a decade, Ms. Adams co-led HBSAAA alumni in a mentoring program with 200+ 7th graders at KIPP Academy, the highest performing middle school in the Bronx and also served on the Board of the KIPP Charter Schools in NYC. She founded the Frederick Douglass Council of the New-York Historical Society while a member of its major donor group, the Chairman’s Council. Twice, she has traveled to the Venice Biennale, the international arts festival, as a member of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Global Council.
Ms. Adams is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Advisory Committee of the United States Institute of Peace, and the Advisory Council of the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream. She was recently named to the board of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy She is a patron of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and is in the seventh year of a planned decade-long study of classical composers at the Juilliard School of Music’s Extension Division.