Protected: Renee Karibi-Whyte

As the senior vice president of Marketing, Communications, Insights & Inquiry and Corporate Secretary at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (RPA), Renee Karibi-Whyte leads RPA’s efforts to broadly share impactful philanthropic practices with donors and organizations seeking to accelerate social change. She develops RPA’s internal and external communications strategy, manages and stewards RPA’s brand, and oversees public relations. As a member of RPA’s six-person Executive Leadership Team, Karibi-Whyte also assesses sector trends to develop the global growth plan and is a key partner in working across the organization to determine future focus areas and to find stories of impact to elevate. Her role includes conceptualizing multi-year engagement strategies that include convenings, publications, surveys, public relations, internal communications, and external partnerships. 

Karibi-Whyte joined RPA from Thomson Reuters, where she held a leadership role in strategic marketing and thought leadership for the legal sector. In that role, she and her team won several awards for innovating business ideas and creative execution of marketing campaigns. Karibi-Whyte’s background also includes business leadership in the research and professional education sector, as she was a senior division manager at American Conference Institute focused on events in the legal, insurance, and financial sectors. Earlier in her career, Karibi-Whyte worked as an attorney, counseling clients on securities, pharmaceutical, construction, and IP litigation at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, among other law firms. Additionally, Karibi-Whyte served as a special assistant to the Tribunal President and Legal Consultant at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, where she researched and advised the Presiding Judge and President of the Tribunal on a wide variety of international, criminal, and evidentiary law issues. There, she was part of the team that wrote the first war crimes verdict since the Nuremberg Trials. 

A member of the Department of Justice Honors Program and a former clerk for Chief Judge Julian Abele Cook, Jr. of the Federal District Court of the Eastern District of Michigan, Karibi-Whyte received a JD from Harvard Law School and a BS from Florida A&M University’s School of Business and Industry.