Amber Valdez (she/her) is a Senior Program Associate with WestEd’s Resilient and Healthy Schools and Communities team. She supports local, regional, and state agencies and organizations to design and transform complex systems for equity. Valdez provides technical assistance—including coaching, consulting, facilitation, and strategic planning to child-, youth-, family-, and community-serving agencies in areas of systems improvement, design, and leadership. She is also a technical assistance provider with the National Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety at WestEd.
Valdez brings experience working with public and private sector systems, including education, health, and community development agencies, nonprofit and for-profit organizations, and foundations. Her expertise includes complex systems change, transformational leadership, participatory change approaches, cross-sector collaboration, continuous improvement/improvement science, human-centered/liberatory design, and strategic planning. She has authored several publications on systems change and continuous improvement, including Participatory Systems Change for Equity: An Inquiry Guide for Child-, Youth-, and Family-Serving Agencies, and Getting Better at Getting More Equitable: Opportunities and Barriers for Using Continuous Improvement to Advance Educational Equity.
Before coming to WestEd, Valdez led a consulting business supporting youth-, family-, and community-serving agencies and organizations with strategic planning, resource development, and community partnerships. She also served as a nonprofit leader supporting school and district leaders in the Oakland Unified School District with resource development, community schools design, family engagement, and educational leadership.
Valdez co-led a team that received a WestEd Strategic Investment Grant to support child-, youth-, and family-serving system leaders with understanding, designing, implementing, and reflecting on opportunities for participatory approaches to systems transformation. The investment will support the development of a coherent and comprehensive set of resources that can be leveraged by WestEd and, importantly, child-, youth-, and family-serving system leaders.
Valdez earned a BA in women and gender studies and ethnic studies, and a MA and EdD in educational leadership from Mills College. She is also a member of Education Leaders of Color (EdLoC) and a certified improvement coach with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.