Valerie Irick Rainford
Founder & CEO, Elloree Talent Strategies
Valerie Irick Rainford is uniquely qualified to advise CEOs and boards after delivering historic results at two iconic organizations on Wall Street. She founded Elloree Talent Strategies a consulting firm that partners with senior leaders to drive strategies that visibly increase the representation of diverse talent within their companies.
A savvy business executive with a passion for equity and diversity, Valerie is a soughtafter speaker, author and thought-leader on advancing diverse talent with 30 plus years’ experience driving business transformations with people at the center. She spent the first 21 years of her career at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York where she rose to become the most senior black woman and the first to achieve a Senior Vice President title. As Executive Business Sponsor, she is credited for launching the Fed’s first employee resource group and hiring the first Chief Diversity Officer in the organization’s history. She then went on to spend 12 years at JPMorgan Chase leading numerous complex business transformation programs, including serving as head of Advancing Black Leaders, a unique and first of its kind role where she was charged with delivering increased focus on attracting, hiring, retaining and advancing top black talent at all levels of the organization. In three short years in that role, Valerie led the firm’s representation of black professionals to historic results, including increasing the black senior executive talent by over 70%, embedding strategies that led to increases across all representation of diverse talent.
Elloree Talent Strategies takes Valerie’s transformative approach and strategies for increasing workforce diversity to organizations across corporate America.