
Tracey Wiley
Secretary
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Tracey has been a board member of Foodshed Capital since July 2021. She is founder and CEO of Rainmaker Industries Group, LLC, a consultancy based in Virginia. With nearly three decades of experience in public relations and marketing, supplier diversity, and minority business development, the consultancy is a culmination of her work leveraging relationships to elevate communities of color and create access to models that build generational wealth for a diverse people.
Prior to Rainmaker, Tracey served a 7-year appointment with the Commonwealth, starting in 2014 when she was appointed by Gov. McAuliffe to direct the merger of the former Department of Minority Business Enterprise (DMBE) and Department of Business Assistance (DBA). Her first order of business was to rally state buyers and agency heads to support the Governor’s initiative to increase utilization of small, women and minority (SWaM) owned businesses.
In January of 2018, Tracey was reappointed by Gov. Northam to continue her work in establishing a new Agency to support SWaM businesses. Her leadership and the Agency’s role expanded at the onset of the COVID-19 health pandemic in 2020, when her team led efforts to assist small, women and minority owned businesses with accessing federal funds for the paycheck protection program and economic injury disaster loans. In the final months of 2020, she had oversight for the deployment of over $100 million in small business recovery grants to more than 3,000 Virginia small businesses. Tracey’s final major initiative included her work in the development and implementation of the Governor’s Executive Order 35 and her team’s completion of the Commonwealth’s Disparity Study. The ten-month study outlines recommendations that champion advancing contracting opportunities for women and minority owned businesses.
Tracey’s involvement in the community is well-established. She serves on the Board of Trustees and is Vice Chair for the Virginia/West Virginia Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, where she is an MS advocate/survivor. Tracey also leads the Board of Directors for Boston based non-profit, Interise, a national organization promoting the delivery of capacity building programs for low income and disadvantaged businesses, specifically the StreetWise MBA. She is a Richmond native who attended Richmond Public Schools and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Speech Communications from Old Dominion University.