Christine Mackey-Ross

When Christine Mackey-Ross (she/her) joined AMN Healthcare in 2019, she jumped at the opportunity to continue her work in the DE&I space. While diversity was already an important initiative at the healthcare staffing company, Mackey-Ross has focused on weaving its diversity beliefs throughout the company’s search work, putting policies and processes in place to advance diversity both internally and in AMN’s work placing healthcare professionals.

For Mackey-Ross, however, successful DE&I work must start with yourself. An incident a few years back in which Mackey-Ross uncovered a bias within herself that she had been wholly unaware of set her on a personal mission. “No one thinks they’re a racist, but we’ve all been indoctrinated, whether we believe we have or not,” she says. “My own awareness is my greatest accomplishment because without personal awareness, you are just teaching people facts.”

No one thinks they’re a racist, but we’ve all been indoctrinated, whether we believe we have or not.

Mackey-Ross incorporated this philosophy into the workplace, hiring a group of individuals to lead an eight-week program for her team, providing education on unconscious bias and the pervasiveness of systemic racism. At AMN, DE&I initiatives are not conceptualized as a separate idea or entity but rather a window through which Mackey-Ross and colleagues view everything they do.

For enterprises and staffing providers looking to advance this cause, Mackey-Ross says it’s imperative to adequately resource a dedicated DE&I team. “You wouldn’t hire one HR person for a company of 3,500. But you think one DE&I person in a company of 3,500 does it? No, it doesn’t,” she says. “If you’re serious about it, it has to be a line item in the budget.”

At AMN, Mackey-Ross has been instrumental in laying the foundation for a diverse and equitable future, in conjunction with many others, mapping out plans for the internal team, suppliers and clients alike. Her DE&I work extends beyond AMN, however; Mackey-Ross belongs to her municipality’s Restorative Justice Committee, which seeks to connect young offenders with the impact of their offense on the communities, and sits on the members board for the Missouri Botanical Garden, where she works to provide typically excluded populations with access to the arts in their communities.