When Hilina D. Ajakaiye talks about cities, she isn’t referring to skylines or statistics. She is thinking about neighborhoods, about who gets to shape the narrative, and about who benefits from the economic engines that power urban life. Her approach to civic innovation is not based on temporary programming. It is rooted in changing how people see themselves in the cities they call home, and how those cities see them back.
The All Inclusive Boston campaign, which launched during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, was a direct response to a truth long left unspoken. Boston’s tourism identity had historically relied on a narrow set of images, Ivy League campuses, cobblestone streets, and revolutionary history. That version of the city was incomplete at best, exclusionary at worst. At the onset of the campaign launch, Hilina knew that any recovery plan for Boston’s tourism economy would have to be more than economic. It would have to be cultural.
Rather than restore what had existed before, she helped lead an effort to reimagine the story entirely. All Inclusive Boston was not crafted as a traditional tourism campaign. It was a statement. It challenged the assumption that culture and economy exist on separate tracks. Hilina’s approach continue to insist that they are interdependent, that without cultural equity, economic opportunity will always be unevenly distributed.
The campaign reached beyond downtown and into communities that had long been absent from Boston’s visitor narratives. Roxbury, Dorchester, and Hyde Park and many more neighborhoods beyond downtown and Seaport area were not afterthoughts. They were central. The collaboration was intentional, bringing in community voices, artists, and entrepreneurs to shape a new visual and emotional vocabulary for the city. The goal wasn’t just visibility. It was ownership. Hilina was inspired by the All Inclusive campaign and its primary leading entity, Colette Phillips Communication.
That philosophy carried into other initiatives. Under her leadership, Meet Boston introduced TheBOS, a mobile visitor information center that brings hospitality services directly into festivals, neighborhoods, and community events. It offered more than logistics. It offered presence. It acknowledged that tourism doesn’t have to be something that happens to a city. It can be something co-created with its people.
But campaigns and mobile centers only scratch the surface of Hilina’s vision. Her deeper contribution lies in how she reshapes the infrastructure that governs inclusion. She led the formation of the Meet Boston Foundation to build a philanthropic arm with a long-term mission: reinvesting in local, community-led tourism and supporting cultural institutions that have historically operated without institutional backing. This was not a gesture. It was a system redesign.
She also spearheaded the transformation of Meet Boston’s traditional membership model, replacing it with a partnership structure designed to include small businesses and diverse stakeholders. The shift signaled a move away from transactional relationships and toward shared accountability, one that aligns with how she defines equity: not as representation alone, but as real access to power, participation, and economic development for ALL.
What makes Hilina’s leadership effective is her ability to connect civic imagination with operational detail. She does not romanticize inclusion. She operationalizes it. Her strategies are rooted in understanding how decisions get made, how funding flows, and how gatekeeping is institutionalized. Her impact comes from changing not just who is in the room, but how the room functions.
She also knows that inclusion isn’t just a policy outcome. It’s a sensory experience. People know when they are welcome in a city, not because a brochure tells them so, but because they see themselves in the fabric of it. In the businesses that thrive. In the images that circulate. In the language that defines belonging.
For Hilina D. Ajakaiye, civic equity is not about making space at the table. It is about asking who built the table, who has access to its agenda, and what gets funded as a result. Her leadership is quiet but resolute, focused not on visibility for its own sake, but on building durable systems that extend opportunity to those historically left out.
Boston will continue to change, as all cities do. But the question that guides Hilina’s work remains consistent: are we building a city where everyone can see themselves in its future?
That is civic innovation, not as theory, but as practice. And that is the work she continues to lead, deliberately, strategically, and always in service of something larger than herself.