About Valda Boyd Ford, MPH, MS, RN
Valda Boyd Ford is one of America’s leading presenters on interactive communications, work force performance, diversity initiatives and management, and cultural competency for the rapidly changing demographic landscapes of our times. A member of the National Speakers Association (NSA) and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), Valda founded the Center for Human Diversity in 1998 and is Chief Executive Officer.
Natural born story teller since the age of 10
Valda grew up in rural, segregated North Carolina. Her mother was a hair dresser who served a unique clientele – the African American women who worked in the cotton mills of the North Carolina textile industry. At the age of 10, she was put to work scratching the scalp and meticulously combing the embedded cotton lint out of the hair of the mill worker women while they waited for their turn in her mother’s chair.
As young Valda performed this grueling task for one woman after another, she listened to some of the most unimaginable tales of life, love, heartache, motherhood, perseverance, degradation, and indomitable triumph of the spirit – and hilarious anecdotes – week after week. She became an inveterate listener – an attribute she claims became one of her greatest professional strengths. By the time she was a teenager, she was a neighborhood story teller who could paint word pictures as vividly as the true-life stories she heard from the beauty shop women.
When high school student Valda Ford began openly expressing a desire to go to college and become an astronaut, it was not the local school counselors who encouraged her – in fact, they told her to consider more “practical” goals like working in the mills or becoming a beautician. It was those same beauty shop women, ranging from school teachers to the barely literate who looked unwaveringly at her and said, “Don’t you let anybody tell you what you cannot do. You be whatever God wants you to be in this life.”
From registered nurse to health care entrepreneur to international speaker
Over the next 30 years, Valda Boyd Ford went to college – though she started later than many of her high school peers and she earned a registered nursing degree, but she hardly stopped there. Ford has a Bachelor of Science degree from Winston-Salem State University, a Master of Public Health in Health Policy Analysis and Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her Master of Nursing Administration from Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., where she also served on the faculty of the School of Nursing for nearly five years.
Her nursing career took her to Saudi Arabia, Finland, and eventually the Caribbean, where, as in her home state of North Carolina, she started her own lucrative health services company. Gradually, she realized that she had spent the majority of her life away from the people she loved most – her family, and she moved to Omaha, Nebraska to be near her elder sister and brother.
Along the way, Valda developed a passion for mentoring and teaching about health care, cultural competency and designing community-based programs. It was only natural that she would become an internationally recognized authority on the subjects. To formalize processes and strategies she decided to pursue a new vision that ultimately led to creating the Center for Human Diversity.
Today, she is a well-known professional presenter on leadership, public health and cultural competency and has presented or consulted in Saudi Arabia, United States Virgin Islands, China, the Netherlands, Poland, Ghana, Saudi Arabia, Denmark, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Wales, Afghanistan, and Australia, and 25 states in the United States. She served as Director of Community and Multicultural Affairs at the University of Nebraska Medical Center for almost six years and, since 2005 has served as the Director of Refugee Initiatives for Unite for Sight – an international agency dedicated to eradicating preventable blindness with 4,000 volunteers worldwide.
Valda spent months working with Unite for Sight in refugee-based clinics in Africa and Asia. There she developed partnerships with eye doctors and surgeons to provide sight-restoring cataract surgery to people who would never be able to afford it and took thousands of pairs of eye glasses to the residents of the refugee camps. Valda worked with the teachers at the camps to develop sustainable programs for educating school children about eye safety and good nutrition and creating teams to assess and differentiate visual and learning deficits. She also developed microenterprise programs for the women of the camps.
For her work at the camps she was recognized as Humanitarian of the Year in 2005 and Volunteer of the Year in 2006. In July 2007, she delivered an address at the Seventh Annual International Conference on Communities, Organizations, and Nations in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her topic was “Training the Teachers: Developing Sustainable Programs in Refugee Camps.”
Point person for change in multicultural world
Valda Boyd Ford is a living library of personal cross-cultural experiences and anecdotal case studies. She has a must-be-seen-to-believe repertoire of story-telling, singing and dramatic soliloquy that creates a relaxed intimacy in even the most staid conference settings.
In every new challenge, Valda sees for herself, listens intently, envisions and acts. Her methodology never fails, whether in developing “The Paralysis of Political Correctness,” “Leadership in a Changing World,” “Customer Service in the Real World” workshops, “Law Enforcement and Cultural Competency,” train-the-trainer programs or any of the dozen other topic areas delivered through workshops, seminars, and presentations that are the hallmark of the Center for Human Diversity. She is a high-energy, thought-provoking, and sometimes hilarious speaker who now averages at least 50 presentations a year to groups as diverse as chief executives of major global corporations, health care professionals and students, to international forums dedicated to policy formulation that improves the health of the most vulnerable groups on the planet.
Finally, but not by any means totally, Valda Boyd Ford is a member of the Director’s Council of Public Representatives, an advisory group to the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She travels to Bethesda, MD, to provide input to the many Institutes and Centers of the NIH. Of particular note is her work with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and her interpretation of the NIH’s Heart Truth Campaign through the Heart and Soul Red Dress Event – an annual event that has moved from a simple educational dinner to address heart disease among women to an annual event that has crossed state borders, and under her leadership, is now, perhaps, the most multicultural Red Dress event held in America.
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