BP Life Coaching Services LLC

Barbara Palmer, OTR, CLC, CHC, CBIS, MISM, MA, is President and CEO of BP Life Coaching Services, LLC, a professional coaching and management consultancy specializing in the provision of customized transformational diversity, equity, and inclusion training services within for-profit, non-profit and government agencies. She is trained as an occupational therapist specializing in cultural diversity, occupational justice, and organizational change. Barbara Palmer is a certified transformational life coach, certified health coach, and certified brain injury specialist who understands personal and corporate transformation and facilitates lasting personal, professional, and organizational change. Barbara is also a certified health coach and a certified brain injury specialist, with extensive administrative, program development, and program director experience, including higher education responsible for curriculum development, delivery, and compliance.

Barbara has twenty-plus years of administrative experience overseeing and developing training programs and community partnerships within for-profit and non-profit organizations and draws from her decades of experience working with healthcare, government, professional, educational, philanthropic, and other business entities. 

Before launching BP Life Coaching Services, LLC, Barbara worked as an allied health program director and professor in higher education. She holds an MISM from DeVry University Keller Graduate School of Management, a Master of Arts degree in Christian Counseling from Word Bible College, and a Bachelor of Science Degree in Occupational Therapy from Wayne State University. She is an evidence-based Certified Health Coach with certification from the National Society of Health Coaches of America. Since growing up amid racial unrest, she has remained abreast and involved in cultural diversity equity and inclusion issues locally, nationally, and globally.

In a racially diverse neighborhood, she grew up in Detroit, Michigan. She attended school with people of several ethnic groups, such as Italian, Polish, Russian, Czech, Slovak, Arab, Asian, Hispanic, American-Caucasian, Jewish, and African American. However, within five years during her upbringing, African Americans were the primary ethnic group that populated the neighborhood and school, initially due to increased gang activity in the area. Over a period of another five years, on July 23-28, 1967, neighborhoods and their diversity in Detroit were forever changed when race riots broke out after police clashed with a mob of angry African Americans who began protesting in response to a police raid on an unlicensed after-hours bar that was hosting an event honoring eighty-five recently returned Viet-Nam Veterans. Things quickly got out of hand for the police, who fled, after arresting everyone, including the veterans. Violence erupted and escalated quickly throughout the city. More than 7,200 arrests; 1,189 civilians wounded; forty-three civilians killed; 493 soldiers injured, and 16 Airborne army men, one police officer, two firefighters, and 1 Michigan national guard were killed; more than a thousand buildings burned and destroyed. Looting of corner stores and other neighborhood businesses was prominent, and the setting on fire of homes and buildings was beyond anything the fire department or army forces could control. The Michigan Army National Guard and U.S. Army’s 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions were ordered by Governor George W. Romney into Detroit to establish order in the city and enforce curfews. It took weeks to achieve some semblance of order and more than forty years to restore the city. https://www.history.com/topics/1960s/1967-detroit-riots

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Detroit_riot

https://www.britannica.com/event/Detroit-Riot-of-1967

Barbara’s work history includes her role as a project coordinator for a minority health and research project which explored health disparities regarding the prevalence of diabetes and colorectal cancer, conducted by the University of Alabama at Birmingham in partnership with Tuskegee University and community partners. Her work as an occupational therapist has afforded her multiple opportunities to experience racism and yet look beyond it because of her belief that we are one race, human. However, she recognizes that racism, prejudice, and unconscious bias have resulted in disparities that impact diverse people groups and show up in numerous ways, including, but not limited to, occupational injustice and disparities in healthcare services. She understands that the variables that result in inequalities are complex but, when identified, can often be transformed if approached in ways that address the changeable variables. Diversity, equity, and inclusion issues have changeable variables if addressed in ways that get to the root of the problems and facilitate meaningful change, which has the power to last.

She is recognized as a thought leader on health disparities, racism, cultural diversity, equity, inclusion, and cultural competence. According to Barbara, cultural competence is a concept or ideal that is worthy of achieving but cannot be reached because it is a dynamic concept. There is always another person we have not encountered from a culture we are unfamiliar with. So the goal of being culturally competent continues to be something we strive for. As a post-professional occupational therapy doctorate student at the Boston University focusing on social policy, she collaborated with the Executive Director for the World Federation of Occupational Therapists (WFOT) and conducted a systematic review on cultural diversity, equity, and inclusion, and updated the WFOT official statement document on cultural diversity. She also worked closely with city, county, and state government offices as a community leader in response to leading an Army of Compassion (a diverse group of volunteers that came together to help serve people impacted by Hurricane Katrina in Birmingham, Alabama. Her work regarding Hurricane Katrina and assisting the elderly age at home was recognized by the Mayor of the City of Birmingham, Alabama, the Alabama Governor’s office, and the United States (by Condoleezza Rice) for outstanding community service. The community services recognized included various support and vocational training services designed to address the basic needs of individuals and families displaced by Hurricane Katrina. She also coordinated and directed a special week-long day camp for children, adolescents, and parents displaced by Hurricane Katrina that offered training to help them process the trauma of losing life as they knew it before, loss of their homes, communities, family members, friends, pet, other loved ones, etc.

She is one of nine children and lives in Houston, Texas. She is the proud mother of four adult children (one son and three daughters), thirteen grandchildren (three grandsons and ten granddaughters), and three great-grandchildren (two great-grandsons and one great-granddaughter). She is committed to being a part of the solution in facilitating the healing of the United States and the world from the disease of racism.