Michele Meyer-Shipp

Michele C. Meyer-Shipp is a C-suite executive, board leader, and thought leader with a career spanning more than two decades across professional sports, global nonprofits, professional services, and Fortune 500 companies. Meyer-Shipp serves as interim executive director and board chair of the Fritz Pollard Alliance Foundation, an independent organization focused on promoting and monitoring minority hiring for head coaching and other high-level positions in the National Football League. In this role, Meyer-Shipp advocates for equitable access in professional football, publicly defending policies such as the Rooney Rule and collaborating with leaders across the football ecosystem to expand pathways to decision-making roles in the sport.

Meyer-Shipp's career includes executive leadership experience in employment law, public service, and diversity and inclusion. She began as an employment litigator in private practice and later served as a law clerk to Justice James H. Coleman Jr., the first Black judge on the New Jersey Supreme Court. Her public service roles include gubernatorial appointments as general counsel of the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor and director of the New Jersey Division of Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action. Meyer-Shipp has held senior diversity and inclusion roles at Merrill Lynch, Prudential Financial, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, and KPMG, where she led enterprise-wide inclusion strategies. At Major League Baseball, she served as chief people and culture officer, overseeing human resources, workplace culture, and diversity and inclusion for the league office.

Meyer-Shipp also served as chief executive officer of Dress for Success Worldwide, a global nonprofit employment resource for women, where she led a comprehensive reinvention of the organization, modernizing strategy, governance, and operations across 145 affiliates in 23 countries. She expanded corporate partnerships and advanced economic opportunity for women. Meyer-Shipp serves on the board of directors of the Ladies Professional Golf Association, where she chairs the human resources committee and contributes to executive succession and organizational effectiveness. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and Seton Hall University School of Law and holds a certification as a senior human resource professional from the Society for Human Resource Management.

Meyer-Shipp is a speaker and thought leader on leadership, workplace culture, and talent strategy, with features in The New York Times, The Economist, Forbes, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, ESPN, and Sports Business Journal. She has contributed to Yahoo Finance News and appeared on programs such as The Tamron Hall Show. Her recognitions include Forbes "50 Over 50" Impact Honoree, The Network Journal's "25 Influential Black Women in Business," Black Enterprise's "Portraits of Power," Business Insider's "38 Power Players of Consulting," and Black Enterprise's "Top Executives in Corporate Diversity." She was inducted into the Rutgers African-American Alumni Alliance Hall of Fame.