April 7, 2024
Black Summit Interviews
Season 2, Episode #5 – Shakira Abdul-Ali

This month, Glenn Greenidge and Grace Lawrence interview SHAKIRA ABDUL-ALI: 

Watch below. For audio only, CLICK HERE to go to our podcast website, or look for us on Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, iHeart Radio, and other popular podcast directories.

Shakira Abdul-Ali is an organization development consultant, facilitator, trainer and coach, with proven success in delivering business, organization and personal effectiveness programs. She has supported institutions in generating value through assessments for diversity, equity and inclusion, supplier diversity programming and development, designing and managing culture change and organization learning, and building high-performance teams and work systems. An MBTI® qualified facilitator, Ali also uses such instruments as the Enneagram, DiSC and FIRO BTM to assist clients in identifying strengths and challenges. 

Her professional experiences include a tenure of some seventeen years in the public sector where she served variously as an Economic Development Planner for the City of Newark; Assistant Director for the NJ Governor’s Study Commission on Discrimination in Public Contracts; Technical Assistance Office Administrator, and Chief of Minority Business Enterprise for the NJ Department of Commerce & Economic Development. More recently she served as the director for the City of Trenton Department of Health and Human Services, and was recently appointed to serve as a Board Member for Governor Murphy’s newly created Maternal and Infant Health Innovation Authority. 

She also worked in the private sector, providing support to public sector agencies, in the delivery of human resource and business diversity compliance management programs. As a Senior / Special Project Manager for Armand Resource Group, Abdul-Ali managed compliance for millions of dollars of contracts for minority and women-owned businesses. She designed one of the largest compliance review initiatives in the country, on behalf of the City of New York. That project comprised a review of 45 city agencies’ purchasing practices, in order to design a program to increase procurement from M/WBE-owned companies. She delivered a similar project for a county-wide mental health services agency in Michigan. For that effort, she designed a process and led a team to conduct an organization-wide assessment for diversity, equity and inclusion, and designed a culture change initiative to assist the agency in addressing the barriers and maximizing the assets, to incorporate a new vision for DEI in that agency. 

Shakira earned a baccalaureate degree in Economics and Urban Studies from Wellesley College and a Master of Science in Organization Development from the American University/NTL Program. She is a member of the NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science. She acquired coach training with New Ventures West, Inc., as well as a Certificate of Leadership for Diversity Training with the National Coalition Building Institute. She is a co-author of The Sustainable Enterprise Fieldbook: When It All Comes Together, American Management Association / Greentree Press, publishers.

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The views and opinions expressed by the person interviewed are their own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the International Black Summit.