I was a civil rights lawyer for a really long time and our client communities were you know, majority of the global majority, right? And, and yet our staff was not representative of the communities that we served. And I do a lot of work in my organization to help management and the attorneys think about how to build better relationships with the clients that we served and did work to try to have the staff better reflect the communities that we were working with. So, I did that work informally for a long time. And then five years ago, I decided that’s what I should actually be doing. And so, I started Promoting Good on a leap of faith [laughs] thinking there was a need for organizations that want to be inclusive…or maybe don’t always want to do it. A bit of both. And so, I started a company that just does that. So, it started out with just me, and now there’s five of us. All women of color, and we are trying to help organizations do their work differently.
Valerie Zolezzi-Wyndham was born in 1983 in Mexico and came to Worcester, Massachusetts in 2002. She has always worked in Worcester County, and she currently lives in Upton, Massachusetts. After graduating from law school, Valerie was employed as a managing attorney at Community Legal Aid. She is the founder and CEO of Promoting Good, LLC, which is a consulting firm that leads transformational change processes based on diversity and equity. She has expertise in health equity and social determinants of health-focused strategies. In this interview, Valerie discusses her journey through her education in undergraduate and graduate school along with personal challenges that she has faced. Her interest in working in the field of law stems from her desire to understand how justice can be achieved. At Promoting Good, she does not work as an attorney because she believes that laws are created by humans and diversity/equity has to be outside of legal work.