Serena Williams

Over the years, Williams has directed much of her philanthropic energy toward educational initiatives. In 2008, she partnered with Hewlett Packard and Build African Schools to establish the_ Serena Williams Secondary School _in Matooni, Kenya. Appointed as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 2011, she promoted the organization’s Schools for Africa program to improve educational access for children of primary school age in 21 countries across the continent. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she partnered with t-shirt company Bella+Canvas, the National School Board Association and Scholastic to provide more than 4 million face masks to children in underserved schools across the U.S.

Meanwhile, Williams has maintained a strong commitment to the community of Compton, California, where she grew up. In 2018 she and her family opened the Yetunde Price Resource Center (YPRC), an initiative that offers critical services to local families impacted by violence, including healing-centered and trauma-informed programs to advance social cohesion and racial justice. The center is named for Williams’s eldest sister, who was accidentally killed in Compton in 2003 after being caught in the crossfire of gang violence.

Through her example and her activism, Williams has transformed professional tennis, advancing the cause of equal pay for women players and inspiring a new generation of talented athletes of color to claim their place on the court. On a smaller scale, Williams has used her influence in fashion—a notoriously exclusive, white-dominated industry—to open doors for designers of color. In 2019 she leveraged her Nike sponsorship to create the Serena Williams Design Crew, an apprenticeship program that recruits aspiring young designers from racially underrepresented communities to work on her Nike collections.

When she retired from tennis in 2022, Williams shifted her focus to her venture capital firm, Serena Ventures. She originally launched the enterprise as a side project in 2014. Since she learned that only a tiny fraction of all VC funding typically goes to women, however, Williams has begun investing with a new sense of purpose. With companies founded by women and people of color accounting for more than three quarters of her SV portfolio, Williams has found yet another avenue to champion equity and inclusion.

Contributors: Maha Tazi, Erin Brown