Contributed photo
James Rawlings, visiting Wall Street for Founders Day.
With his feather-adorned Stetson hat firmly on his head, James Rawlings visited the New York Stock Exchange for a “Founders Day” celebration of successful Black businesspeople — and returned to New Haven fired up about how to inspire a next generation of corporate leaders and healthcare advocates.
Rawlings is the president and CEO of Michelle’s House, a nonprofit headquartered at Chapel and Orchard Streets that serves as the region’s first education, prevention, and community-support center for people who suffer from sickle cell anemia. That’s a painful and oft-misdiagnosed genetic disease that largely affects African Americans.
Last Thursday, Rawlings — who is also a retired former Yale New Haven Hospital executive and former head of the Greater New Haven NAACP — visited the New York Stock Exchange at 11 Wall St. in downtown Manhattan for a Black History Month event called Founders Day.
Thomas Breen photos
Rawlings's nameplate from the Founders Day event.
Rawlings: "We have the ability to change and [help] a population that's been underserved."
In a Monday afternoon interview with the Independent in his second-floor office at Michelle’s House at 1389 Chapel St., Rawlings described how he got a chance to mingle with roughly 150 Black “millionaires and billionaires” and business leaders from across the world for an event that culminated with the head of a top African payment technology company ringing the stock exchange’s closing bell.
Rawlings told the Independent that he wasn’t invited to attend because he’s a millionaire or billionaire. Rather, he secured a spot in the room thanks to a Michelle’s House volunteer who also works full time in marketing and advertising in New York City.
At the Founders Day event.
He said that meeting with Black men and women who are leaders at, say, the Gates Foundation and Google and Goldman Sachs was not just an invaluable networking opportunity at which he could encourage wealthy potential-partners to team up with Michelle’s House and the Sickle Cell Disease Association of Southern Connecticut to help raise awareness about what sickle cell anemia is and how to test for and treat it. He said the Founders Day event also inspired him to try to bring more Black-business-leader events to New Haven to help show young city residents that they too can reach the highest echelons of the corporate world.
“That program should be on wheels,” he recalled thinking as he attended the Wall Street gathering. It was a reminder to him of the importance of “doing well with wealth and doing well within your community.”
So keep an eye out for more community events at Michelle’s House in addition to the clinical work like sickle-cell-train testing that already takes place there, Rawlings promised.
“We have the ability to change a disease and [help] a population that’s been underserved.” Attending this stock-exchange-hosted Founders Day event made him all the more inspired to continue that work.