2023 West Michigan

Valissa Armstead is the director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion of Corewell Health —formed by the joining together of Beaumont Health and Corewell Health in 2022. Valissa is responsible for ensuring the strategic alignment of DEI to Corewell Health strategies. She oversees these efforts through DEI’s five areas of focus framework: cultural competency, equity of care, workforce diversity, community engagement, and supplier diversity. She serves as a champion, consultant, bridge builder, strategic leader, and partner, empowering leaders across the system to identify and execute initiatives for effective organizational transformation. She is a proven innovator, relationship builder, change agent, and influencer for diversity, equity, and inclusion, bringing firsthand, expert knowledge to Corewell Health’s DEI efforts. Valissa joined Corewell Health in July 2015. Under her guidance, Corewell Health’s leadership signed the #123forEquity Pledge, which builds on the efforts of the American Hospital Association’s National Call to Action to Eliminate Health Care Disparities. The #123forEquity Pledge summons hospitals and health system leaders to accelerate efforts to collect sociocultural demographic data, design intentional plans and expand cultural competency training to enhance the diversity lens within leadership and governance structures, and to strengthen community partnerships. This pledge would become the catalyst for the signing of additional pledges and the creation of Corewell Health’s Antiracism Pledge. Valissa established a cross-functional diversity workgroup at Corewell Health that reaches out to hiring managers across the system to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion to their direct reports. To achieve this, she created an in-house Cultural Intelligence Facilitators Network that delivers cultural competency training in courses like unconscious bias and cultural intelligence. As a result, almost half of the health system team members have received training in cultural competency. Working towards improving the collection and reliability of patient demographic data (race, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, and gender identity), Valissa helped to lead efforts in the expansion of the health system's electronic medical records, thus helping to advance the organizations efforts to better understand the patient population as a first start towards eliminating health and healthcare disparities. She helped launch volunteer employee-led inclusion resource groups (IRGs) formed around common demographics, characteristics, or shared interests. The IRGs focus on culture, commerce, career, and community that led to business results. Currently, there are eight IRGs at Corewell Health: African American, Asian American, Hispanic and Latinx, LGBTQIA+, individuals with disabilities, veterans, women, and young professionals. Most recently, she helped design, develop, and deliver a full-day, system-wide initiative called Day of Understanding. This day is used to share, listen, and be heard as BHSH continues to move forward together in addressing systemic racism. A native of Flint, Michigan, Valissa previously worked as an engineer and as a direct result, understands the importance of data as the foundation for strategic recommendations. She also speaks regularly about her lived experience of being impacted by the intersectionality of being Black and female. She uses her education and experiences to fuel, inform and guide her work as a leader in the diversity, equity, and inclusion space. Valissa earned a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering, a Master’s in Business Administration, and a Doctorate in Management (ABD) as she completes her research in organizational leadership with a specific focus on DEI. She is a Certified Diversity Practitioner through the National Diversity Council, a Certified Unconscious Bias Facilitator, and a Certified Cultural Intelligence Facilitator from the Cultural Intelligence Center. Additionally, she has completed executive leadership programs with the Disparities Solutions Center and McKinsey Company.