Anjylla Foster Puts Relationships Front and Center
By Jordan Bradley
For Anjylla Foster, Ph.D, Executive Director of the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, leading her organization is a full circle moment and a bit of a family affair.
Not only have many of her family members joined the sorority, but her mother, grandmother and aunt have also all served the organization in various capacities throughout the years (her mother was a past president, her grandmother was a past regional director, and her aunt is a current licensed vendor), Foster said, and her dad is a member of its brother organization, Phi Beta Sigma.
With this level of involvement, Foster has a unique dynamic with the org—one that few could replicate. She grew up attending annual gatherings and conferences with her mother, and would often help her aunt sell Zeta merchandise.
“I’ve only missed one of our international biennial conferences in my lifetime,” Foster told USAE. “So I say that people have known me since I was in my mother’s stomach in 1990 in St. Louis.”
For Foster, growing up and watching her family members lead and interact with other Zeta members taught her the intrinsic value of relationship-building in membership organizations.
While helping her aunt at events, Foster recalled “seeing the people who would come up to her—they may not even want to buy anything, they just wanted to give her a hug and say hello because they were so excited to see her.”
As an undergrad at the University of Cincinnati in her home state of Ohio, Foster joined Zeta while pursuing a bachelor’s degree in marketing and international business. After working in retail management, Foster returned to her alma mater and received her master’s degree in communications, during which time she “really found an appreciation for research, qualitative data and analyzing things,” she said.
After earning her master’s degree, Foster worked in hospitality “which I absolutely love, but the hours can be awful,” and eventually found a role with Cincinnati-based 3CDC, a nonprofit real estate developer working to revitalize the city’s downtown.
“That’s when I started to fall in love with operations, nonprofit management and what I call cultural institutions, so like parks, museums—tourism [spaces] in a sense,” Foster said.
Next, she moved to Chicago and provided direct support at a local nonprofit “and realized that wasn’t my jam,” Foster said. “It’s very hard to provide social services and maintain your well-being.”
At her next role in the guest experiences department at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Foster “once again fell in love with civic spaces, cultural institutions and guest experiences.”
The role “was the perfect mixture of both worlds. I got hospitality, I had operations, I had people management and human resources,” Foster said. “I loved that job so much.”
But then the pandemic happened, and much about the role changed. Simultaneously, Foster was pursuing her PhD in organization development through Benedictine University. When the role of executive director at Zeta opened in 2024, Foster was thrilled because the job “encompasses absolutely everything that I love in my hodgepodge of a career,” including hospitality, customer service, event management and engagement and operations.
Zeta is “a little different” from other sororities and fraternities, she told USAE, in that 90% of its membership demographic is comprised of alumni members, and recruitment initiatives are focused on all ages, not just college-age. Recruitment efforts begin as young as 4 years old, and Zeta is unique in that the membership goal of the org is a lifelong commitment from members. Women who have already graduated college are welcome to join Zeta’s graduate chapters.
“Our goal is, ‘yes, please join in college,’” Foster said. “Our organization was founded by collegiate women. We love, love, love our undergraduate members; they keep us feeling young and vivacious and they’re the vitality of the organization. But at the same time, my goal is if you do come through college, that we retain you so that you go into what’s called [a] graduate chapter.”
At its core, Zeta is about civic engagement and relationship fostering. As the sorority’s executive director, her role most closely resembles that of the head of an association: she works with new chapter, board, and organizational leadership every two to four years, so relationship fostering is key, and understanding the way stakeholders and individual contributors work is paramount to success, she said.
“I would not be able to do what I do if I didn’t understand who people are and how they work—and it’s beyond communication styles,” Foster said, adding that knowing a colleague’s work schedule and availability allows her “to reset my expectations and meet people where they are.”
Through the recent transition of board members, Foster has been diligent in “making sure I really understand who I’m working with and how I can best support them to achieve the objectives that they’re looking to achieve,” she said.
She continued: “Relationships are number one, but I call myself the organizational influencer—and I love doing that. There are some decisions I have to make on the operation side, but really me job is to bring good partners to the table, have meaningful conversations, look at the risks and assess those, see where are the spots that we can’t see in our peripheral, and making sure that whatever we do will align with their objectives and advance our mission.”
As executive director, Foster is also responsible for creating operational guidelines and procedures as needed. The sorority is also a property manager, hosts sizable annual events, and distributes scholarship funds.
Looking forward, Foster is excited to have more conversations about shifting the way Zeta approaches events from not just a tool to gather, but a central component of the sorority’s business.
“We have great businesses, and maintaining and recruiting membership is a part of that business, but we bring in more money when we do our biennial conference,” Foster said. “So how do we really make sure that our business model for doing and executing that [side of the] business is documented… it can be replicated fairly easily; [it] has low risk [and] the right partners with us. So I’m really excited to be working through [and] really documenting what does it look like for us to say we’re in the business of event management and execution.”