Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey is a historian and humanitarian. He has spent over a decade working in community development, education, social policy, and youth engagement. After Toronto’s infamous Year of the Gun in 2005, for instance, he founded an award-winning non-profit for youth at-risk of gun violence, and subsequently served for three years as a case manager in north Toronto on a $5 million federally-funded, University of Toronto-evaluated youth gang prevention and intervention project. His service and quiet advocacy over the years have earned him a YMCA Peace Medallion, an Ontario Medal for Young Volunteers, the T.P.S. Keith Forde Youth of Excellence Award, the Toronto B.M.E. Church Police and Community Award of Excellence, among others.

As a 2015 Echoing Green Global Fellow, Wendell is the co-founder and president of the award-winning Tujenge Africa Foundation, a U.S.-based 501(c)(3) start-up that champions quality education for impoverished students in sub-Saharan Africa, where he promotes pluralism, inter-ethnic dialogue, and nation-building. He is also a founding director of Dream Maker Ventures Diversity Fund, the first venture capital fund in Canada that is Black-led and invests in the tech start-ups of under-represented minorities.

Wendell earned the Ph.D., M.A. and M.Phil. at Yale University. Born in a slum in Accra, Ghana, he now divides his time between academic and humanitarian spaces in the United States, sub-Saharan Africa, and Canada.