Gary Blackard

Instructor

Gary is President and CEO for Adult & Teen Challenge (ATC), a faith-based, behavioral health recovery organization with 200+ locations in the United States. ATC offers the continuum of care from prevention to long-term residential programming (modified therapy model) including licensed programming. ATC serves over 11,000 people every year.

Prior to this, he served as chief information officer and member of the President’s Cabinet for Evangel University. He is also an Adjunct Professor for Healthcare Administration, a certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt leader, and executive consultant. Gary has extensive global operational experience as Vice President for Client Operations and Strategic Services Delivery for Xerox Corporation where he led organizations as large as 700+ people and managed annual revenues of $540M. He has successfully worked over twenty operational improvement engagements as a Performance Improvement Consultant with several Fortune 500 clients including Kaiser Permanente, WellPoint, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Cisco, Northrop Grumman, IBM and many others. He also served in the United States Marine Corps.

His healthcare and leadership experience includes financial management (large P&Ls), healthcare technology, patient engagement through technology, organizational strategy development and execution, managing large organizations, organizational design, performance improvement, human capital management, Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, team development, change leadership, and project management.

Gary earned his Master’s in Health Administration from the University of Southern California and is also a certified Facilitator for the Paterson Center StratOp system, a strategic operating plan development and execution system.