Depth You
Can Feel.
“What I bring to this partnership is not a program or a process. It is 25+ years of having been in the room — the board room, the crisis room, the room where the hardest decisions live — and coming through with something worth sharing.”
Northwestern University
CERTIFIED Executive Coach
25+
Years Coaching High-Impact Leaders
BizWomen 100
National Business Journal's Inaugural BizWomen 100 Listing
ATHENA
International ATHENA Award
$1B+
Foundation Under Leadership
Ed.D.
Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters
The Partnership
You will work with someone who has led from every seat and who brings that full range of experience into every engagement. Not to impress you. To serve you.
Qiana’s practice is built on a conviction she has tested in the most demanding leadership environments: your best leadership is already inside you. Her role whether advising, activating, or architecting a whole life is to help you find it, free it, and focus it. What makes her uniquely equipped to do that is not simply years of experience. It is the breadth, depth, and integration of those years and what she carries from them into the room with you.
The pressures of leading a mission-driven or founder-led organization are distinct — and rarely understood from the outside. Qiana has navigated the complexity of purpose-driven leadership at every level, from the grassroots to a $1B Foundation. She brings strategic clarity, systems fluency, and the kind of candor that helps you lead with both conviction and adaptability.
Qiana has occupied both seats — accountable to boards as a CEO, and responsible for governance as a board chair. That dual fluency across fiduciary, strategic, generative, cultural, and risk responsibilities means she advises boards from lived governance, not theory. Purpose-driven governance is not a formality. It is the X-factor that determines whether a board is a liability or a legacy asset.
The Experience
Qiana’s 25+ years span an arc that most advisors cannot claim: from clinical practice to corporate officer, from federal policy to philanthropic stewardship. That range is not incidental, it is the source of her distinctiveness as a partner. She has occupied roles with P&L accountability, board relations, regulatory compliance, human capital leadership, and enterprise risk management across corporate, nonprofit, governmental, and philanthropic sectors.
As President and CEO of a $1B+ bi-state community health foundation, Qiana has stewarded diverse capital investments, shaped public policy, and built the kind of cross-sector coalitions that span resident and faith leaders, business councils, municipalities, and state government. Her leadership has positioned the foundation as a national model for health equity not through transactions, but through trust-based partnership. That is how she leads. And it is precisely how she partners with you.
Prior to philanthropy, Qiana served as a corporate officer and Vice President at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City — where she championed the integration of health equity into core corporate strategy, led population health solutions and medical management, and delivered millions in healthcare savings through innovation in care delivery. Earlier in her career, as a licensed clinical social worker, Qiana served as Clinical Director of Behavioral Health at a federally qualified health center, administering clinical and community programs that supported individuals, families and children living with behavioral health challenges and recovering from substance use while leading a workforce of over 200 staff.
She also served as Deputy Director of the official state-based office of U.S. Senator Jean Carnahan — briefing a United States Senator, shaping legislative strategy, and advocating for the health and human service needs of Missouri constituents. Her “self to systems” leadership philosophy, and practice of centering people in driving change and managing transitions was forged in these rooms.
Qiana is a member of the International Women’s Forum — a global organization of preeminent leaders — and Women of Influence. She is a sought-after speaker on purpose-driven leadership, health equity, healthcare quality through a racial equity lens, organizational transformation, and whole-self leadership.
In all of Qiana’s career experiences, she’s quick to note that her “real gig” has always been as a wife and a mother. Of her many accomplishments, she’s most proud of the beautiful relationships she has with her two young adult daughters.
The Values that Ground Qiana
Grounded in power and action. The anchor beneath every dimension of Qiana's life and practice — present in how she leads, how she advises, and how she accompanies.
Wife and mother of two young adult daughters. The relationships through which her deepest legacy is being shaped — and the lens through which she understands the intersectional whole-life demands her clients carry.
A systems-change activist recognized by local, state, and national audiences. Health equity, democratic participation, racial justice and economic inclusion are not causes she supports — they are the architecture of her leadership.
The conviction that leaders are not their titles. That the personal and professional are not separate. That sozo — healing and wholeness — is available to every leader willing to do the work of becoming fully who they were created to be.
The willingness to name what is true, hold what is hard, and move toward what is right — even when it is costly. In herself. And in the leaders and communities she supports.
The Whole Person
