Helping organizations replace labels with understanding by transforming communication, leadership, and systems.
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About Us
CultureShift Strategies, LLC is a communications and systems transformation consulting firm that partners with healthcare organizations, nonprofits, and mission-driven institutions to strengthen multicultural engagement, build trust, and improve outcomes through communications and systems transformation.
We help organizations replace labels with understanding by transforming the systems, communication, and leadership practices that shape how people experience care and services.
Through strategic communications consulting, cultural humility training, and program development, we support organizations in building systems that foster trust, cultural understanding, and equitable outcomes.
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The CultureShift Philosophy
For too long, patients attempting to manage their healthcare have been labeled “difficult,” “noncompliant,” or “hard to reach.”
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We believe these labels often tell us more about our systems than the people navigating them and that engagement challenges are rarely caused by individuals alone. More often, they emerge from the interaction between people, systems, communication, and context.
Our work helps organizations better understand that intersection so they can build stronger relationships, improve trust, and achieve more equitable outcomes.
The Problem
Organizations often struggle to engage diverse communities—not because people are "hard to reach," but because communication, systems, and programs aren't always designed with their realities in mind.
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Our Belief
Lasting change happens when organizations replace assumptions with understanding.
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Our Solution
The CultureShift Framework helps organizations transform communication, leadership, and systems.
Who We Work With
Non profit and community based organizations building patient education programs and campaigns
Health systems seeking to improve the way they engage with patients with diverse challenges and needs
Pharmaceutical and biotech companies reaching patients and clinicians around various health topics
The CultureShift Framework
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Obtain Baseline Understanding
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Reveal the Narrative
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Understand the Context
4
Redesign Communication & Systems
5
Apply Changes to Practice
Services
Every engagement is guided by the CultureShift Framework, helping organizations move from labeling individuals to designing systems that listen.
CultureShift Systems Assessment & Strategy
A comprehensive engagement designed to help health systems, public health departments, clinical teams and community-facing organizations identify and address communication, cultural, and structural barriers that impact engagement and outcomes. We assess internal narratives, messaging, and systems to uncover gaps and provide a clear roadmap for transformation.
Multicultural Communications Strategy
Strategic support for nonprofit and community focused organizations seeking to improve how they communicate with and engage diverse audiences. We develop messaging frameworks and communications plans that reflect the lived experiences, values, and needs of multicultural communities.
Cultural Humility & Bias Training
Interactive experiences designed for health systems, public health departments, clinical teams and community-facing organizations to better understand how implicit bias, communication practices, and system design influence engagement and outcomes. Trainings are tailored to each organization and grounded in real-world scenarios.
Communications Toolkit & Program Development
Development of practical tools that help nonprofit and community focused organizations improve engagement. These tools are designed for immediate implementation across teams and programs.
Strategic Advisory & Retainer Support
Ongoing partnership for organizations seeking sustained guidance on communications, engagement, and systems transformation. This service provides leadership teams with consistent, expert support as they implement and refine strategies over time.
AKEIA BLUE, MPH, MS
Founder & Principal Consultant
As a child, I was always overweight, even though I played soccer year round and ate a pretty normal diet for a kid. Yet, anytime a doctor would bring up my weight to my mom, it would be accompanied by a simple suggestion: “she needs to be more active and eat better.” No questions. No attempt to understand how active I actually was or what challenges my single mother might be facing. Just assumptions and directives. Experiences like this are why I founded CultureShift Strategies.
My public health career has focused on health communications, working to help patients feel more informed and educated about their health, while also supporting clinicians in providing resources and care to patients. Through all of this work, I have always come back to those early conversations that I had with doctors about my weight and how unhelpful they were. I think about my family members and friends who don’t know the right questions to ask at the doctor and don’t feel comfortable with showing a lack of understanding.
With CultureShift Strategies, I want to improve the system so that patients and clinicians learn to be true partners in healthcare. This includes knowing what quality, culturally appropriate care is and how the social drivers of health can lead to challenges that are often deemed as “noncompliance”.
I want to remove the concept of a "noncompliant" or "difficult" patient from the healthcare system and look forward to working with you to achieve this mission.
What Clients Are Saying
I worked with Akeia to develop the communication strategy for my research lab. Throughout the process, Akeia was very responsive, easy to work with, proactive, and created a custom plan that accounted for the sensitive nature of the topics my lab worked on, as well as my personal capacity to show up online. The result was a strategy that allowed me to grow my lab's following immensely and develop a system that truly highlights the impact of our work.
Makella Coudray, Phd, MPH, Director, SHEER Lab