Who We Are

Peyi is the founding Board President and Executive Director of the Verity Foundation. She is a Professor of International Politics at Ithaca College and is currently the Chairperson of the Tompkins County Human Rights Commission and a board member of the Community Foundation of Tompkins County. Her personal and scholarly work engages and addresses issues of gendered violence, human rights violations, sustainable development, the role of cinema in social transformation, and collective memory in traumatized communities and transitional societies. Peyi was the first black woman to be tenured at Ithaca College, New York, and later, the first to be promoted to full Professor, and much of her work is dedicated to making rights and protections accessible and attainable to vulnerable individuals and groups through advocacy, emergency support, and other strategies that are sensitive to issues of culture, socioeconomic class, nationality status, gender, faith, and the myriad other factors that affect whether people are treated in a just and equitable manner. She served as the first female president of the Association of Third World Studies Inc. (ATWS), and president of the African Studies and Research Forum, and currently serves as President of the African Women’s Initiative of Ithaca (AWI). These platforms provide support and solidarity for participants in the United States and internationally. Peyi hosts the bi-monthly Verity women’s gatherings where women of faith from across the world meet virtually to dive deeply into subjects that affect them and share their experience, expertise, and mutual support in a lively, safe, transgenerational, and diverse space. She is a member of the Nigerian Feminist-Womanifesto platform, an umbrella group comprising almost 400 organizations advancing women’s rights and well-being overseas, and she formerly served as a co-vice president of the Ithaca City of Asylum. In these capacities, Peyi supports community members who feel vulnerable and marginalized as they struggle through court appearances, school disciplinary processes, work discrimination situations, and the aftermath of domestic violence as victims seek emergency shelter, career retraining, job placement assistance, or access to legal services. Having experienced the turbulence and pain of exile and life as a asylee who left her homeland during turbulent persecution of her family, she has worked to empower women, immigrants and vulnerable individuals of every racial and cultural identity, who have been rendered invisible as they deal with interlocking oppressions of racism, discrimination, and silencing. Peyi served for many years as an ambassador for Stephen’s Children’s Home, a center for over 400 children orphaned by the Boko Haram terrorist assaults in Nigeria. Sadly, after decades of providing protection for extremely vulnerable children, the home was forced to shut down amidst the severe staffing losses of the devastating COVID crisis as the children’s welfare could no longer be guaranteed. Peyi is also involved in providing access to transformative development for environmental sustainability in low-income communities and works with an international interdisciplinary collaborative committed to those goals.