Thomasina Williams - Advancement Project - Advancement Project

Thomasina Williams

Founder & Principal Consultant, Sankofa Legacy Advisors

Thomasina Williams partners with business-owning families and families of financial wealth to cultivate “the family side” of family business and family wealth. She helps families optimize their relationships, have productive conversations about sensitive subjects, navigate their inevitable differences, and work together to make decisions about their shared assets and future.
Her work on this often-missing piece of the generational success puzzle extends to helping family advisors, family offices, family foundations, and staff of other family owned or controlled entities build stronger working relationships with their family clients and employers.

An accomplished lawyer and philanthropy strategist, Thomasina is the founder of Sankofa Legacy Advisors. She was the first Family Dynamics Consultant Wells Fargo Private Bank hired to come in-house and play a leadership role in building a new line of business to help its ultra-high net worth clients navigate generational transitions and strengthen family governance. Clients have described Thomasina as their “high-beams,” lighting the way and guiding them through unfamiliar and uncomfortable territory.

A student and practitioner of Bowen Family Systems Theory since 2015, Thomasina applies a family systems lens to help family members individually and collectively identify, simplify, and navigate the relationship patterns that drive their ability to sustain family well-being and financial wealth across multiple generations. As a result of working with her, family members begin to see and explore possibilities they had not considered previously, leading to increased self-awareness, greater systems awareness, and stronger one-on-one family relationships, as well as reduced family financial risks.

Learning about the “shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves in three generations” phenomenon, by which 70 percent of families lose their wealth by the end of the third generation – and realizing that her own family was among these alarming statistics – fuels Thomasina’s passion to help families beat the odds and build enduring legacies.

As a member of the advisory board of privately held Purposeful Planning Institute and the board of nonprofit Galliard Family Business Advisor Institute, Thomasina serves as an advisor to advisors within her field. Beyond the field of family advising, she serves on the board of SIY Global, whose science-based programs help individuals and teams develop social and emotional intelligence to improve engagement and well-being at work. Additionally, she is a member of the advisory board of Enterprising Women magazine.