Transcript

Hello, this is Sally Cohen, and I'm here with Conversations with Sally, and I'm pleased to introduce to you my guest for today, Pameraldo.  So Pam is a member of the NYU community.

She has a master's degree from NYU nursing and a PhD.  She has served as the CEO of two national organizations,  Planned Parenthood Federation of America. And the National League for Nursing and now Girls Inc, which we'll be hearing more about as we move along.

It's interesting to note that as CEO, she led financial turnarounds of all three organizations and created strong marketing capabilities and strong strategic direction in public policy.  , at the National League for Nursing, she increased their revenue from 5. 2 million to 20 million in sales. This is not your typical nurse.

She has consulted across a whole range of healthcare concerns, including the National Cancer Institute, Pfizer, Merck, and the New York City Health Department. She currently serves on the boards and advisory committees related to important social issues, among them communal life that provides housing for the indigent, mentally ill, and persons with HIV.

She chairs the board of CGFNS. It's a global gateway for nurses and other health professionals. She's a speaker and writer on a wide range of health policy subjects, including, but not only, women's health. She has appeared frequently on Good Morning America, Dateline, and MSNBC. So the first question is, we talked about this before, Pamela. You don't have a typical career history here. You focus most of your work on national organizations. Why? What led you when you graduated from NYU to take this path?

That's a good question, Sally, one that I thought about a lot myself. First of all, I was never really that enamored with clinical nursing.  Early on, I had a propensity for understanding the mind body connection.  I was really very much a theoretician and taken with  a woman that had her doctorate in science named Martha Rogers, who was the dean at NYU way back,  but from a practical point of view.  I was going to school to get my doctorate and I needed to work.

Because it was a lot of money, my parents said they'd pay for my undergraduate, then I needed scholarships, there were none for PhDs. So, she said, Earlene McGriff was her name. Okay, so Earlene said, Pam, I think you should be a research assistant. There's this organization called the National Health Council.  And, you know, go interview. I'll get you a job there for this summer. You'll make some money and you'll understand what the whole national landscape looks like.

Great.  I got that job.  On that board were three of our major nursing leaders, and then all physician leaders, pharmaceutical leaders that were physicians, top-notch, I mean they were in high positions. The nurses were,  for those of you that remember, Barbara Barnum, who was dean at Columbia for a while, Lucy Kelley, there were a few heavy-hitter nurses.

And I saw That even with all their credentials and as much as we admired them, they still had nothing to say.  Well, because nobody would listen. So in the meantime, Sheila Burke, who was chief of staff for Bob Dole, Sheila and I are still in touch, was across the street working for the National Institute.

Bob Dole was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, a prominent senator in Washington who then ran for president. Shiel was key on his campaign and, very influential as staff to the Senate Finance Committee, which is, one of the most powerful committees in Washington.

So, Sheila said, Pam,  I need a speaker on this national program, mostly nursing students from all over the country, some medical students, could you talk about your research? I  said, sure. The first talk I had ever given in my life, never mind to a national audience,  And I didn't even know what a lobbyist was, at the time.

Basically I started to talk to all of them in a way that said, we're running in place here as nurses, we have a theoretical approach that's different,  that is going to be furthering is medical model thing alone's not going to work. And if we don't wake up. Doctors are going to be writing orders that say talk to the patient's family QID because they're going to know it matters.

Somebody in the audience heard me and asked me if I wanted a job as a lobbyist for nurses.

I called my mother. I said, Mom, I want me to be a lobbyist. I don't know what it is,  but they want to give me a lot of money. I was pretty young.  She said, Pamela, take the job before they find out. You don't know. You'll know.  That's great. That's a true story. You know, that put me on the organizational track of the woman that was a CEO didn't work out so well.

And so they hired This was at the National Institute of Nursing, right? Yes.. And then they hired me as a CEO. The reason why I got hired, it was really in bad financial straits. And I was the only inside candidate and  I kind of knew what to do, sort of, and it worked.

So did people criticize you or question you along the way? Claire Fagan, God rest her soul, who was a very dear friend of mine.

She used to say, Pam, I don't know what to do with you. You're a one-er. She wanted me to be a dean.  But academia just doesn't move fast enough for me.

And then clinically, I became a team leader and was in charge of the open heart surgery unit at NYU many, many times.

And but the two women that were ahead of me, the head nurse and assistant were young and I knew I wasn't going anywhere and we ran everything we did. IV meds we I mean you name it, we did it.

So I'm thinking also that for some of our listeners, this is wonderful.  What about people who don't want to go on in academia isn't there a place for them to especially I've heard people talk about that with regard to the PhD.

Well, if people aren't going to do NIH research, why would we spend our money on them. And I so vehemently disagree and you're a great example of that because the only challenge I think sometimes is that We don't have enough Claire Fagans and Pamela Moraldos and me sometimes to shepherd those people along and tell them where they might find their niche if it's not in the hospital or healthcare delivery system because there really is a lot of room for all of us out there, right?

 I really have come to believe that nursing Like law, for example, is a good preparation for life.  Because you have a distinct, deep understanding of human nature. You're with people at all the major inflection points in their lives, through pain and suffering and first births and, elderly things.

I'll never forget Stephanie Edgerton's philosophy of science course from my Ph. D.  It teaches you,  Thomas Kuhn's paradigm scientific revolution, that context is king and the theoretical view of the world determines what you see.

How'd you get involved with Girls Inc. which is where you're working now, CEO of Girls Inc. 

Yes, I after Planned Parenthood, I went into a consulting company with a few physicians that I knew we were doing strategy consulting for Pfizer Merck Medical Centers, and it was fun. So while I was doing that, this fellow that was my chief financial officer.

At Planned Parenthood called me and said, Pam, there's this organization called Girls Inc.  They're in New York and they're looking for an executive. And you know, I said, okay, if I give them your name and I said, Mark, it's really small. I said, you know, I would take it as consultant. He said, okay, I'll let them know and tell him that said, okay.

He did and I did and the board loved me and I loved them.  They had 398, 000 in the bank.  Good thing I was a consultant because I had to write off a lot so that I could afford to do that. I like what they were trying to do.

And I thought, you know, at this stage in your career, if you have the skills to help, why not?  There are a lot of young women that,, need this kind of support we say the mission is to inspire all girls to be strong, smart and bold. So as a practical matter, what that means is we deliver programs that range from financial literacy to social media, to college completion, to mind-body matters.

Which is right now a godsend in it because there's a crisis in mental illness among teen girls.  , we were seeing a lot of it prior to the pandemic.  And then it was just on steroids, suicide attempts, depression, anxiety.  So we have mind-body matters. Our programs are really, I call them our signature program because we created them.

We said, the programs at the national level are kind of dated. Let's do our own thing. Most of our programs are digitized, so they're interactive So during COVID, we were able to have Zooms and, girls from all over the country were signing up.

Ultimately, I want to do this globally

Yeah. So how does a girl get involved? We mostly, work with the New York Public School System, some private schools. We work through the Department of Community Services. So we're in about  150  schools throughout the city.

And they get to know us, and so they ask us then, the DOE, and they ask us to come in and deliver their programs.  We have two ways of doing this.

Basically, you see if there's alignment.  Admissions and strategies, and the principal or one of the key teachers wants to bring us in and then our comprehensive programs, which means they get all of them every day is one way to go. Or if a principal, I've had principals say to me, , our girls just aren't focused on their studies.

They all they wanna do is talk about nail polish and boys, I don't know what to do. So we can come in and we give them financial literacy. Healthy sexuality, which gets into relationships and such. Mind body matters. At Project BOLD, which teaches them self-defense because they come from tough communities.

It looks like an undergraduate liberal arts curriculum. Dance, music. I mean, we really do give them the, the whole gamut. And the most important thing,  you know, Carol Gilligan said at Harvard, you know, she redid the whole Eric Erickson thing.

And I agree, girls learn better relationally. And so we have teacher-led programs that are digitized, and that really works well.  And make sure that there are role models

Pam. What's financial literacy?  We had a financial literacy program, but we wanted to digitize it teacher-led. With an accompanying app. What it seeks to do is make finance fun because girls really,  you know, they're good at finance, but they're told they're not.

It's taken away from them.  The thing that we really teach them is self-esteem, not to internalize discrimination. I mean, discrimination is one thing. The world is going to try and tell you who you are. Correct. You can't internalize it you have to center yourself and learn to be who you are. That's what we teach them. Where did you get that from?

I studied with a Buddhist for about 10 years, but, but before I was always what you would they would call a seeker.  

Nobody really realizes when you have a problem, something is wrong. You want to get somewhere in life.  It's really best to go within. Yeah. It's a, it's a tricky thing for most people to get in our world. But I got to say the thing that really helped me on this path. was NYU and Martha Rogers.  Martha Rogers theory you know she came up with a few different So explain it because our readers, our listeners won't necessarily know who she was. Okay. She was a nurse, but my PhD program looked nothing like we know to be nursing. It looked more like quantum physics.

 She did panels with David Bohm, who studied with Einstein.  They were, they were talking, but he was talking about an implicate order and explicate order. In other words, We weren't allowed to say something caused something. She looked at a unitary man. It was, what she called her theory and energy patterns.

She created a whole new paradigm for us to operate in.

 I take responsibility for everything because it's my energy field. And so, if something is wrong externally, I look within

What you see is yourself pushed out in effect. I'm going to remind our listeners, this is all nursing.  I want to say nurses are wonderful people. In general, I think the best people in society, and there are lots of very smart nurses too.

What advice do you have for listeners who might want to go? I can't think of another word other than a nontraditional nursing path or to follow, go work in the nonprofit world, take their nursing expertise and walk a different walk than what.

Most of us do.  You know, I was on an NYU panel recently with , an NYU graduate, that had developed an app for consumers to be alerted to different vital signs and things. There is so much room for innovation and I think mostly what we need is nursing care. We need nurses to use technology. There is no, there, there's something called, you know, a medical wand now that does diagnosing and we're the organization I'm chairman of, we're thinking about distributing it for nurses to use in, in low-income countries so that they can get care.

So, so I think the, you know, we used to say Marcus Welby should be a nurse for anybody that remembers that program. But I think that's happening.  I think there's practitioners becoming the primary care providers. And I think, you know, through technology, we can begin to consult on chronic conditions.

I mean, I've had a few things that, you know, I call my sister, I put it on, on a zoom and I say, what do you think this is? Nurses really know what they're doing and I think there's really so much room for innovation.

That's a great point to begin to close on let me ask you if other of our listeners are interested in learning about girls Inc. or contacting you. What should they do? Should they contact me? Should they go to Girls Inc. and find your name there? What would be the best thing? They could contact you or go to our website.

Girls Inc. of New York City.  We're really looking at putting our programs through technology on a huge platform that will be available to everybody.

But for now, I think the citywide conferencing going on our website would be great. So you're not, you know, I mean, I'm happy for them to call you. Yeah, yeah. Reach me at sally. cohen at NYU. edu. And I'm glad to pass along messages and questions to you as, as they come in.

That would be great.  So thank you for a truly inspiring conversation. We could go on forever. We could, Sally. We could. We could. Thank you so much. I'm going to end it here.