Ama Karikari-Yawson, JD

Ama Karikari-Yawson, Esq., is a Harvard-trained attorney, diversity trainer/consultant, and author. She facilitates powerful diversity and inclusion training sessions that incorporate legal analysis, storytelling, drama, history, cutting-edge psychological research, mindfulness, and restorative justice circles. These sessions engage participants and organizations and truly propel them toward their goal of fostering a more equitable, cohesive, and productive work environment.

Through her consulting practice, she conducts customized employee surveys that reveal the diversity challenges professionals face daily at work due to their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, parental status, political affiliation, ability, and other identities. Ms. Karikari-Yawson and her team then use this information to craft and execute unique diversity action plans that result in increased recruitment and retention of diverse employees at her client companies. Her clients include Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, Shearman & Sterling LLP, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, Boise Schiller Flexner LLP, Vedder Price, ITE Management, FHL Banks, Eimer Stahl LLP, and Much Shelist P.C., among others.

Prior to becoming a diversity trainer and consultant, Ms. Karikari-Yawson worked as a media and telecommunications financial analyst at Bank of America, a banking supervisor at Bank of Ghana, an associate at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, and senior counsel at Citigroup, Inc.

She earned a BA from Harvard University, an MBA from the Wharton School, and a JD from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Ms. Karikari-Yawson lives on Long Island with her husband and two sons. She loves writing and is the celebrated author of many bestselling children’s books, including Sunne’s Gift, Earthe’s Gift, and The Talk: A Black Family’s Conversation about Racism and Police Brutality.