Kamela Forbes-Matheson
Kamela Forbes-Matheson
Global Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Pride Global
Kamela Forbes-Matheson grew up in the Bahamas, where the majority of the people looked like her. But when she attended business school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she was one of just two Black students admitted that year. “It was a major change for me,” she says, and this sparked her passion for what she does. Today, she’s working to connect organizations globally with diverse talent — a far cry from her modeling days, or curating luxury lifestyle experiences for Inner Circle Connect clients, as she did early in her career.
Through personal connections, Forbes-Matheson met the CEO of HireTalent, fellow DEI Influencer Ashish Kaushal, who recruited her to become a diversity manager. She says the company was steeped in a desire to foster diversity, but many times, clients were reluctant to fill positions with workers who didn’t fit the standard profile of those who have previously held similar positions. While at HireTalent, she helped launch the Consciously Unbiased initiative, through which she educated corporations, nonprofits and other organizations about unconscious bias.
“There’s obviously training that’s needed for people to actually learn what it is that they’re looking for [in talent], because sometimes due to bias, they don’t really know how to screen effectively,” she relates. So, they set out to help people “discover … or become aware of their unconscious biases, of the blinders they were wearing that were actually keeping them from being able to find what it was they were looking for.”
In May 2021, she took her efforts worldwide, becoming the global director of diversity and inclusion at Pride Global, a New York-based human capital solutions and advisory firm with operating companies throughout the US, UK, Canada, India and Brazil.
One of her main areas of focus at Pride Global has been the company’s nonprofit, Pride in Education, through which she and her team work with nonprofits and professional networks that serve diverse populations to provide résumé review, interview prep, confidence-building exercises and professional development tools. They serve high school students, college students and people who are already working but whose skills still could use some fine-tuning. “It’s one of those things where we are giving back to the community while helping to build diverse talent pipelines,” Forbes-Matheson says proudly.
2023 DE&I Influencers List