Joy of Giving: YDS Alumni Board member strives to be 'a good ancestor'

The Rev. Dr. Danielle Ayana James ’01 M.A.R., ’02 M.Div. has made big leaps across career fields, from the sciences to divinity to the corporate world. But throughout, she has lived out a commitment to social impact. She currently serves as Co-Founder & Chief Growth Officer at STRAAD. The company is a leadership and organizational performance advisory firm supporting leaders in their delivery of meaningful strategic change. 

Ayana was born in Trinidad and Tobago to a Chinese father and West African mother and spent her teen years in Canada. She followed an early calling to become a physician and pursued an honors science degree at McMaster University. She spent her undergraduate summers volunteering with non-profits in Guatemala, Bolivia, and Albania, and looks back on those experiences as the source of her desire to support community development and grassroots leadership. 

Ayana’s intercultural upbringing and service work awakened questions in her about justice, equality, and conflict which could not be answered in her study of biochemistry, so when she applied to medical school, she also applied to Yale Divinity School. Ayana chose YDS. She later followed her M.Div. with a D.Min. at McCormick Theological Seminary.

After 20 years with the United Church of Canada leading congregations, Ayana pivoted to the corporate world and a career in strategic change. She remains fascinated by how organizations move forward and is committed to supporting principled leaders. She is a member of the YDS Alumni Board and joined the Yale Alumni Association Board of Governors in July 2025.

How did your time at YDS influence your life and career? 

Having come from pre-med studies, I experienced orientation, disorientation, and reorganization at Yale. It is where I formulated my sense of identity and realized how to apply theology in the way I show up in the world.

During my third year, I was selected to be a Magee Fellow at Dwight Hall, where I was expected to lead reflections for students engaged in service. On the first day of the fellowship, Rev. Dr. Jerry Streets (’75 M.Div., then Yale Chaplain) called us all together. It was the morning of September 11, 2001, when our world was rocked with terror. I had intended to be downtown working on social justice that year, but of course we went out into our communities right away. I spent the remainder of the year studying interfaith reconciliation and participating in healing circles around what our campus and nation were facing.

Yale was an ecosystem where we could think and pray, be and do. It allowed me to grow up into my fuller humanity. 

What part of YDS’s recent work most appeals to you and why? 

I appreciate the focus that YDS has given to the development of a strategic plan. They are designing for the future now. Among the five pillars, YDS is rethinking ministerial leadership and contemporary vocational pathways. This gives YDS alum a useful differentiation because they will understand how to lead from a place of empathy, curiosity and have an ability to see around the corner. Leadership competencies like these can be applied across many fields.

YDS alumni and students are living out our deepest goals and highest possibilities of being reflective citizens and contributors. Being on the Alumni Board is a lovely opportunity to tell the story of YDS across the Yale community and bring forward the value of a theological education to the leadership of our professional schools. I am committed to being back in the community that formed me and to help them continue to keep a diligent approach that benefits the next generation of leaders.

How does your theological and ministerial training show up when you are coaching executive leaders?

All organizations are in the business of people. Leadership is a sophisticated and personal combination of tactical, strategic, and human skills. Our personal stories and our relationship to the sacred show up in our leadership. YDS is exceptional at equipping students with critical thinking skills, the courage required to ask questions that matter, and an ability to generate insights along the way, and this is what I get to bring to our executive clients across not-for-profit, faith-based, and corporate contexts.  

How has giving has been personally significant to you?

I support future students because I have been the recipient of other people’s generosity. I am standing on the shoulders of others, and therefore, I too strive to be a good ancestor. The work that I do and the ability to contribute to Yale is a way of saying “thank you” and “let’s keep going.”