“From America’s Heartland to the World”
When Valda Boyd Ford graduated from college as a registered nurse more than 30 years ago, she saw her profession as portal into global experiences she could only imagine as a child growing up in a rural community of High Point, North Carolina. Nobody in her world talked about “globalism” and international relations. But that didn’t matter. Valda knew from her geography books and her social studies books that there was a vast world just beyond her reach as a child, and once she acquired an education, she would use it to bridge that gap.
Early in her career, Ford worked as a critical care registered nurse in Saudi Arabia. There she quickly rose through the ranks to in-service educator and nurse manager. While in the Middle East, Ford worked with staff from 33 different countries and realized the serious gap in cultural competency. Ford developed her own training module to include in new employee orientation in Saudi Arabia and later the Caribbean. In the Caribbean, she also developed the first cardiac, stroke and physical rehabilitation center in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
It wasn’t long before Ford consulted with other businesses on how to recruit and retain workers into environments that suffered from high turnovers related to cultural dysfunctions. Studying the roots of this deficit in cultural competency, Ford realized that the health and medical professionals in the United States needed to be better prepared culturally while still students. She eventually accepted a position on the faculty at Creighton University School of Nursing, Omaha, Neb., in 1997.
“Born to teach, born to reach”
After Creighton, Valda served as Director of Community and Multicultural Affairs for six years at the University of Nebraska Medical Center – the largest health complex in a six-state region of Heartland America. She had developed a passion for mentoring and teaching about health care, cultural competency and designing community-based programs and it was only natural that she would become an internationally recognized authority on the subjects. It was her vision to formalize these processes and strategies that led Valda to create the Center for Human Diversity.
And Valda has never lost sight of the fact that nothing surpasses live field experience on the international level. Since 2005, Valda 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. She 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 a multicultural world”
Today, Valda Boyd Ford 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 is particularly known for combining business philosophy with an extensive repertoire of stories learned from case studies and work place faux pas. She has helped leaders in the insurance, law enforcement, education, health care and food service industries develop more inclusive and productive work force environments, as well as slow down the expensive and demoralizing revolving door of recruitment and retention.
Valda Boyd Ford 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. She is a member of the National Speakers Association, Society for Human Resource Managers and has presented in China, Australia, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, Poland, Denmark, Wales, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Wales, Afghanistan and 25 states in the U.S.A.
She 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.
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