MEET DR. ANGELA GRAHAM-WILLIAMS,
LPC LPC-S LLP
Experience
Dr. Angela Graham-Williams, LPC LPC-S LLP is a passionate, healthcare executive and practitioner with over 20 years of national and international experience conceiving and providing mental/behavioral health and substance use disorder direct, client treatment in outpatient, inpatient/residential, intensive outpatient, home/site-based, private practice, and academic settings. She has founded a barrier-free, virtual, private practice to provide emotional support with an emphasis on the deactivation of severe anxiety via the infusion of therapeutic intervention and the Word of God to clients around the globe. As an executive administrator and true academic, Dr. Angela Graham-Williams has also developed an original service delivery construct and adjacent certification program entitled Multidirectional Emotional First Aid © (MEFA) that enables its users to provide immediate relief
to those suffering from emotional injuries, in real-time. Additionally, as a classically trained, professional ballerina and VIP member of USA Track and Field, Dr. Graham-Williams’ area of concentrations are not only providing clinically and insight-based emotional support to individuals struggling with the trauma of our times but also to artists and elite athletes attempting to navigate the unnecessarily, ubiquitous perils of performance anxiety on grand stages.
Career Moves
In her commitment to impacting the lived experiences of African Americans and other people of color, Dr. Graham-Williams has served in myriad senior leadership capacities, hosted a radio broadcast “Change Your Mind” seeking to destigmatize behavioral health care in urban communities, won awards teaching within the Social Science department on the collegiate level, and drew on her experience as a classically trained ballerina to found a nonprofit organization seeking to expose young Black girls to classical dance technique.
Around the World
In 2019, she was selected by the United States Department of State to devise infrastructure and build a curriculum that advances the self-esteem and empowerment, personal agency, and self-actualization of young girls from across the African Diaspora as National Capacity Building Specialist in Eswatini Africa. In this role, Dr. Graham-Williams was responsible for furthering the launch of the NGO, Girls Leading Our World, within its existing 88 locations across the nation. Shortly after, Dr. Graham-Williams led the Foundation for Excellence (FFE) as President. The FFE manages an endowment of $500 million dollars and with an anti-racism mission, seeks to address racial disparities in the areas of education, economic security, and birth outcomes via access to education, job placement, affordable housing opportunities, etc. for vulnerable urban families.
Visionary
Just prior to founding her private practice, Dr. Graham-Williams was hired by Xavier University of Louisiana to lead both offices of Counseling and Wellness and simultaneously train the athletic department to transform their staff into one that mindful enhances the lived, mental experience of athletes while bolstering their confidence and quest for excellence. She is an international and national visionary, speaker, and presenter, responsible for the development of myriad innovative, Behavioral Health concepts.
Education
Dr. Graham-Williams has an earned doctoral degree in psychology from Sofia University and is a dual Licensed Professional Counselor and Psychologist in the state of Michigan and Professional Counselor in the state of Louisiana. She holds board certification in Integrated Care, Clinical Supervision, and Program Evaluation and Responsible Research from the Cherokee Institute, the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Hill Country Therapy Associates and Center for Research and Academic Success, and the University of Michigan, respectively.
Civic Involvement
For her achievement in nearly every facet of service delivery and program development and application, Dr. Graham-Williams has won several awards including the Mary McLeod Bethune Award for Communications of Arts and Letters, National Association of Black Professional Women’s Business Woman of the Year Award, Randall Brock Leaders in Business Award, and Kellogg Community College’s Adjunct Professor of the Year. Her professional affiliations include the National Association of Health Services Executives, American Mental Health Counselors Association, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., Health Providers Service Organization, and life membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.Â
An award-winning leader, Dr. Graham-Williams has served on boards of directors for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Kalamazoo Michigan, the Urban League of Southwest Michigan, the national HBCU Campaign Fund, and appointed by the Mayor of Kalamazoo, Michigan to serve as an inaugural member of the city’s Civil Rights Board.
Inspired Curricula
Driven by a need for personal wellness and in the moment support for the difficulty of contemporary stressors, Dr. Graham-Williams’ Multidirectional Emotional First Aid (MEFA) is a framework for non-experts to provide assistance for him/herself and others that not only teaches skill but enables individuals to understand that s/he has the capacity to aid after an emotional injury. MEFA seeks to promote the understanding that this concept is as applicable for the internal care for ourselves as it is for the external support of others in both horizontal and vertical relationships.
Handily equipped with extensive knowledge, training, and experience, Dr. Graham-Williams’ Culturally Competent, Integrated Care curriculum is intentionally developed with mindful attention to creating integrated care models that reduce barriers unique to marginalized and disenfranchised patients. Her program not only improves the cultural competency of healthcare staff but provides both hands on, interpersonal as well as more global, broad stroked customer service strategies extremely effective with the aforementioned population.
Dr. Graham-Williams has successfully presented both internationally and nationally and integrated and improved the patient experience and emotional intelligence of employees via her time tested techniques in several Patient Centered Medical Homes, Federally Qualified Health Centers, and numerous university student health services systems.
