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Colette Phillips connects people.

As chief executive of her own diversity marketing firm, she introduces corporate clients to the distinct cultures and economic power of minority communities. In her private life, she helps those communities achieve social and economic access.

Born into a family of entrepreneurs in Antigua, where, Phillips recalls, "every significant authority person in your life looks like you," she assumed that the rest of the world resembled her Caribbean island.

Then she went to college in Boston during the school busing tensions of the early 1970s, and "learned a lot about racism and bigotry." After graduation, she returned to Boston with two complementary goals: to build her own business and to help heal the city.

In the early 1990s, she conceived and, with the American Jewish Committee, helped establish Boston's Black-Jewish Economic Roundtable, a group that continues to produce enduring personal and business relationships. In a similar way, she later increased the interaction between the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

In a current initiative she calls "culture for all cultures," Phillips introduces Boston's Museum of Fine Arts to a wide range of local communities, so that people of all backgrounds visit and support it.