Ask Roxann Cooke, MBA ’16, about her achievements, and you’ll quickly hear a story full of sponsors, mentors, and allies. Her supporters included the high school guidance counselor who encouraged her to apply to an Ivy League school; the friends, family, and faculty who helped her navigate past systemic oppressions; the community that fueled her successful banking career; and the Suffolk University MBA program that provided important skills and experience that have guided her along the way.
Now, as the consumer bank and wealth management regional director for JPMorgan Chase, she’s drawing on her experience at Suffolk as she works to create economic equity in communities like Roxbury, where she grew up.
“I wanted to make more than a living at work,” she told an audience in March at the Boston Chamber of Commerce’s 2022 Pinnacle Awards, where she was recognized for her achievements in management. “I wanted to make a difference and an impact through my work."
Cooke emigrated from Jamaica to the Grove Hall neighborhood of Roxbury at the age of 10. Her grandmother, an entrepreneur in Jamaica, had always stressed the importance of education, but no one in her family had been able to attend college. “My cousins went into the military; others went to work,” Cooke says. “Others that lived around me in Grove Hall, it wasn’t their first inclination to go off to college.”
But at Boston Technical High School—now the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science—she was encouraged to apply to colleges by a guidance counselor, Charles Andrews. “I gave him the list of schools and he said, ‘Go for it,’” she recalls.
Cooke was admitted to Dartmouth, where she initially intended to study to become a doctor. That changed during a semester off, when she took a short-term job as a bank teller at Boston Five Cents Savings Bank—and loved it. “I pivoted,” she says. The temporary job turned into a career.
From the beginning, Cooke aimed to use banking to lift her own community. Her first job as a bank manager was at a Bank of Boston branch on the corner of Blue Hill Avenue and Cheney Street—right where she’d grown up in Grove Hall. “I intentionally applied for it because I knew the perception that branch had,” she says. “It wasn’t thriving; the success factor wasn’t there. I needed to change that narrative.”
And she did—“because the community supported me,” Cooke says. People she knew in the neighborhood came to see her: “They opened accounts, they came and high-fived, or brought lunch.” The branch, she says, became a success. “It was a win for me, a win for the community,” she says. “I went away and got the education I needed, but I still wanted to give back because something was given to me.”
Eventually Cooke would become a regional manager, overseeing 17 branches at Eastern Bank. One of them, in Roxbury Crossing, was the first new branch any bank had opened in Roxbury in 20 years—what she would view as the crowning achievement of her time at Eastern.
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Photography by Faith Ninivaggi
FEATURES
| Fall 2022
By S.I. Rosenbaum
As she rose in management, Cooke often wished she could go back to school to get her MBA. After she mentioned her interest to the learning and development partner at Eastern Bank, where she was working at the time, the partner introduced her to Suffolk’s Tammy MacLean, a professor of management and entrepreneurship who was pitching a new, two-and-a-half-year, Saturdays-only MBA program.
Within weeks, Cooke was enrolled in the program’s very first cohort.
The cohort model, Cooke says, was key to the program. “We bonded together, gelled together, had disagreements together,” Cooke says. “Most of us were also adult learners, going back to school, and going through the same experiences—we’d call each other, support each other.”
Once again, it was community support that made the difference. That wasn’t lost on Cooke. In 2019 (the same year that she received the Sawyer Business School Outstanding Alumni Award at Suffolk’s Celebration of Black Excellence), banking giant JPMorgan Chase tapped her to helm an ambitious expansion into New England—and, later, Pennsylvania. She drew on the positive experiences she’d had in her MBA program, and organized new hires into networks she calls cohorts. “Every time I kick off a cohort, I explain my cohort experience at Suffolk and how that was helpful and how these individuals still support me, how many years later,” she says.
She also looked back to her capstone project at Suffolk to inform her work at Chase. For her MBA, she had studied how to make bank accounts more accessible to people who’d never had them—like the many members of her own community whose credit “blemishes” locked them out—or others who’d had bad experiences with punitive overdraft fees.
When she joined Chase, she was encouraged to find that the company was already implementing a program to address those concerns. “It was in the works long before I got here, but we began to elevate it, give it a little more prominence, as soon as I came on board,” she says.
That was one of the things that made Chase a good fit, she said: Her new bosses seemed to genuinely support her mission of community empowerment and financial justice. As she interviewed for the job, she learned the bank had plans to open a new branch in Roxbury, as Eastern had—but also one in Mattapan, another of Boston’s mostly Black and brown neighborhoods where no new bank branch had opened since the 1990s.
Cooke went to high school near the Roxbury branch and purchased her first home near the Mattapan one. “Talk about coming full circle,” she says.
That project would end up being part of a $30 billion racial equity commitment Chase announced after the nationwide protests of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, aimed at reaching underserved communities of color and closing the racial wealth gap.
The Mattapan branch opened as one of Chase’s “community branches”—complete with spaces for pop-up shops, Juneteenth celebrations, and public seminars on home ownership, financial literacy, and entrepreneurship.
It also opened with a huge, colorful mural—which, it turns out, was thanks to Cooke.
The wall of the building Chase had purchased bore a sepia-toned mural depicting Toussaint L’Ouverture and Marcus Garvey—heroes to the local Haitian and Jamaican immigrant populations. “You can’t touch that mural,” Cooke told the team that was renovating the building. “There’s so much pride in that mural.”
Instead of removing it, Chase ended up tapping the same city mural crew to reimagine the mural—adding a kaleidoscope of color and the faces of local residents. “We came in, we didn’t change the fabric but we added to it,” she says. “This is how you build legacy: You build on what is there, and then you enhance it.”
At the beginning of August, Chase CEO Jamie Dimon visited Boston to announce a huge expansion to the bank’s New England project, going from the current 36 branches here to a projected 90. Cooke is ready for the challenge. “It’s larger expectations than when I joined,” she says. “But that just speaks to successes we’re already having and the company’s trust that we’re going to do well here in New England.”
‘I wanted to make more than a living at work. I wanted to make a difference.’
—Roxann Cooke, MBA ’16