Rebecca is Chief Executive of the 10,000 Interns Foundation (formerly 10,000 Black Interns). A
communications expert and thought leader on diversity in institutional spaces, she was born in
Manchester but grew up between Kenya and South Africa before returning to the UK as a teenager to pursue her swimming career. She is a former world number one and was British champion by age 16 thereafter becoming the first Black woman to swim for Team GB.

Rebecca joined the 10,000 Interns Foundation from NKG, a communications and media agency she founded to work exclusively on social change projects. She was also managing director, looking after clients such as Age UK, Barnwood Trust and grassroots organisations like Exist Loudly, a Black queer youth group in London. Rebecca worked on the incorporation of numerous charities for her clients, securing funding pots from the National Lottery for, among others, the Local Equality Commission, an education initiative aimed at building racial cohesion in rural areas of the UK. NKG’s digital work, specifically film, has been award winning; a documentary she directed and produced on the life’s work of her father received a four-star review in The Guardian and numerous film festival accolades. 

Rebecca’s father, renowned academic and political activist, Professor Rok Ajulu, was a leading thinker on African democracy and in his youth organised resistance movements against post- colonial oppression in Kenya and the apartheid regime in South Africa. Rebecca inherited some of her father’s spirit of activism, outside of work she lends her voice to the issue of underrepresentation of Black swimmers and the low levels of water safety skills in the Black community – working on projects and campaigns for safer sporting environments with the Black Swimming Association and Yale University.

Her background in communications strategy began at Eight Advisory, a financial services firm in Paris. Thereafter she consulted for smaller companies and start-ups from global logistics firms and fashion brands to tech and cosmetics before founding NKG. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Oxford (Brasenose College) and studied for a masters in African Cultural Studies at UW-Madison.