Pastor Gabby Cudjoe Wilkes is a brand strategist, event planner & pastor. Her work is situated at the intersection of faith, culture, leadership and strategy. Gabby spent over ten years in media and entertainment working on the events planning teams for companies such as BET, and working as a publicist for record labels such as Mathew Knowles’ Music World Entertainment as well as gospel music record labels eOne Music, RCA Inspiration and New York City based boutique PR firm, Plan A Media LLC.
Pastor Gabby worked most recently as a Senior Brand Strategist for the Yale University Dwight Hall Center for Public Service & Social Justice where she worked to train undergraduate student leaders to strategize, promote and differentiate their work amongst competing organizations both within the university and beyond.
Pastor Gabby is a national public speaker and one of the founding lead senior pastors of the new church start, The Double Love Experience in Brooklyn, New York. Prior to that, Pastor Gabby served from 2013-2018 as the Co-Pastor to the young adults of the 20,000 member congregation, The Greater Allen Cathedral of New York, under the leadership of the Reverends Drs. Floyd & Elaine Flake. Pastor Gabby is committed to the work of justice both domestically and abroad.
She is an advocate of women in ministry and an inaugural member of the Spelman College Thriving in Ministry Fellowship, The Millennial Womanist Project, a cohort of black women millennial faith leaders across the nation, and an alum of the RISE Together Women in Ministry Mentorship Network.
Pastor Gabby is a board member for Yale Divinity School, an advisory council member for the New York Presbyterian Columbia University Hospital Clinical Pastoral Education Advisory Committee, a board member of The Circle of Sacred Fire Preaching Institute, and a contributing writer alongside some of the nation’s leading faith leaders, to the newly released book (2017): Mr. President: Interfaith Perspectives on the Historic Presidency of Barack H. Obama.
Pastor Gabby holds a Master of Divinity from Yale University where she received the Charles A Mersick Prize for Preaching and Public Proclamation, a Bachelor of Arts in Public Relations from Hampton University where she was a William R. Harvey Leadership Institute Fellow and a Master of Arts from New York University, a joint program through the Steinhart School of Culture and the Stern School of Business. Pastor Gabby is currently pursuing a Doctorate in Ministry at Duke Divinity School. Her doctoral research is centered around social entrepreneurship, social innovation and the black church. She and her husband Rev. Andrew Wilkes were featured twice in Essence Magazine.com, in February 2019 and April 2016, on love and ministry. Follow her @PastorGabbyCWilkes (IG) & @GabbyCWilkes (Twitter).
