Lee Pelton, a longtime nonprofit leader in the Boston area, including a decade as president of Emerson College, will step down at the end of August from his role leading the Boston Foundation.

The foundation announced his impending departure on Thursday and said it would share additional details about the search process for his successor in the coming weeks.

Pelton joined the Boston Foundation five years ago after leaving Emerson College. He served as college president for 10 years, including overseeing operations during the pandemic and navigating financial and enrollment challenges confronting lots of smaller private colleges.

A prominent Black voice in the Boston area, he was especially outspoken after the 2020 killing of George Floyd, a death he called “legalized lynching.”

“America is on fire, I thought,” he wrote at the time to the Emerson campus community. “Even in the face of a viral pandemic that had closed down much of human society, it could not stop a black man from being murdered in public view.”

At the Boston Foundation, he led the nonprofit through a new strategic vision in 2022 and a dramatic expansion of its finances.

Assets grew to $2.6 billion, up nearly $1 billion, during his tenure, with resources dedicated to communities nearly doubling to more than $300 million.

Pelton has nothing yet lined up for his post-Boston Foundation days but said in an interview Thursday he planned to remain involved civically and by serving on nonprofit boards. He said he planned to heed advice he received to take his time and reflect on what his next chapter may be and that he’ll likely have several opportunities to decide from.

“They’ve been inspiring and challenging,” he said of his professional roles, “and I mean challenging in the best sense of the word because I love a good challenge.”

After four decades of what he called “intensive leadership” — 22 as a college president, 13 as a dean and five at the Boston Foundation — he said it was time to devote more time to himself and to his family, which includes three adult children.

He may also write an autobi ographical novel, he said.

Pelton, a native of Wichita, Kansas, is the grandson of sharecroppers who until age 6 lived in a house without indoor plumbing. His father spent much of his career as a laborer until he got a management job with the Wichita Police Department. His mom cleaned houses.

It was Pelton’s early experiences in Wichita that he said propelled him toward a career fighting for equity and giving back. While Pelton was leading Emerson, the Boston Fed published what became an infamous report on median household net worth: $247,500 for white households and just $8 for Black households.

The report created an uproar, spurring the Boston Foundation to create an initiative early in Pelton’s leadership to raise $25 million to help would-be homeowners with down payments and significantly discounted mortgage rates. In three years, the program is about halfway to its goal of covering 700 households.

Pelton called it a signature program for his time at the foundation.

Pelton first came to the Boston area to attend Harvard, where he earned his doctorate in English literature. The first in his family to attend college, he had options for college, he said, but had his eyes on studying in one place.

“I only wanted to come to Boston,” he said. “It’s a city that I love and adore.”

Pelton later taught English and American literature at Harvard, and was later a dean at Colgate University and Dartmouth College. He then served as president for 12 years of Willamette University, a small liberal arts school in the Oregon capital of Salem.

He returned to Boston in 2011 when he was hired to become Emerson’s 12th president.

This article first appeared in the Boston Business Journal