Joy Burkhard, MBA

Joy is the founder and CEO of the Policy Center. She founded the organization in 2011 after leading policy work in California to address maternal mental health and experiencing the loss of her brother to suicide. Joy spent nearly 25 years working for Cigna as a state policy and quality improvement leader. She is a member of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologist’s expert workgroup on Maternal Mental Health, the Federal Maternal Mental Health Task Force, and is a board member of the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative (the nation’s first agency working to solve the U.S.’s maternal mortality crisis), and The Health Care Transformation Task Force. She is the Board Chair of Mom Congress, an organization she founded and the Policy Center incubated.

Joy has received numerous awards, including The American Public Health Association’s Maternal Child Health Leadership and Advocacy Award and The Emerging Leader Award in Women’s Health from the federal Health and Human Services Agency, Office of Women’s Health. Joy holds an MBA from Regis University and lives with her husband and two high-schoolers in Los Angeles, California.