Please welcome the newest member of our Executive Leadership Team: Shelley Means (Ojibwe/Lakota), Chief Culture Officer! Shelley joins us after years of service to our community health center as a member of the Board of Directors and is stepping down from the Board to join our staff. 

As Chief Culture Officer , Shelley will lead the integration of cultural ways of knowing into every sphere of our work, such that our entire organization will be even more aligned with our Indigenous Knowledge Informed Systems of Care.  

Shelley brings extensive community organizing experience to our team. A dedicated bridge-builder, Shelley brings people from many tribal and Indigenous communities together with love and care. Recognizing that “the wisdom is already here,” she looks forward to collaborating with our Traditional Indian Medicine staff and other teams to expand the ways we practice good medicine. 

In addition to her service as a member of the Board of Directors, Shelley has taught cradleboarding classes for our relatives and has also collaborated with our research division, Urban Indian Health Institute, on culturally informed research. This fall, in her capacity as co-coordinator of Native American Women’s Dialogue on Infant Mortality (NAWDIM), she co-published a paper in the International Journal of Environmental and Public Health Research about the role of cultural practices like cradleboarding in addressing maternal and child health inequities. Co-authors on this paper included our Director of Research and Evaluation, Dr. Rose James (Lummi); Evaluator, Martell Hesketh (Michel First Nations); SIHB Grants Manager, Leah Tanner (Nimiipuu “Nez Perce”); and former interns Snowy Johnson (Apsaalooke, Salish, Kainai) and Tia Benally (Diné & White Mountain Apache). 

We are overjoyed to have Shelley at the helm of our broadened vision for Traditional Health. Please help us give Shelley a warm welcome!