BTM95- Abby Malchow – Small Business Empowerment and Mental Health Advocacy at Amazon
Show Summary
On this episode of Behind The Mission, we feature a conversation with Navy Veteran Abby Malchow is the Senior Business Development Manager of Small Business Partnerships for Small Business Empowerment at Amazon. We talk about her advocacy for suicide prevention and how she has taken her passion for mental health and wellness to one of the world's largest corporations.
About Today’s Guest
Abby Malchow is the Sr. Business Development Manager of Small Business Partnerships for Small Business Empowerment at Amazon helps drive the success of small businesses and underserved business populations (including minority-, women-, and veteran-owned businesses). Additionally, Abby serves on the Global Board of Directors at Amazon for Mental Health & Well-Being (MHW) as the Director of Corporate Strategy. Abby helped launch MHW in April 2020 as Amazon’s 13th Affinity Group and in nine months MHW grew by a rate of 600% and currently has over 18K members from 27 countries across the globe. Prior to joining Amazon, Abby worked at Intel Corporation and is a retired U.S. Navy Chief and combat veteran, serving more than 20 years in the military.
Abby has been a passionate advocate for veteran suicide prevention since 2014 when she was one of the 22 veterans selected by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) to advocate to Congress for support of the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for America’s Veterans Act, which was signed into law by President Obama on February 12th, 2015. Additionally, she is a 2018 alum of the inaugural cohort of President George W. Bush’s Stand-To Veteran Leadership Program where she worked in collaboration with Intel’s “AI for Good” team on developing Machine Learning (ML) models on social media platforms to provide targeted suicide prevention to veterans. More recently in 2020, she led a project at Amazon in collaboration with the AWS ML Solutions Lab which built a ML model for RallyPoint that will allow them to quickly identify posts that indicate a high risk of self-harm to enable potentially life-saving intervention.
Abby has been a passionate advocate for veteran suicide prevention since 2014 when she was one of the 22 veterans selected by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) to advocate to Congress for support of the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for America’s Veterans Act, which was signed into law by President Obama on February 12th, 2015. Additionally, she is a 2018 alum of the inaugural cohort of President George W. Bush’s Stand-To Veteran Leadership Program where she worked in collaboration with Intel’s “AI for Good” team on developing Machine Learning (ML) models on social media platforms to provide targeted suicide prevention to veterans. More recently in 2020, she led a project at Amazon in collaboration with the AWS ML Solutions Lab which built a ML model for RallyPoint that will allow them to quickly identify posts that indicate a high risk of self-harm to enable potentially life-saving intervention.
Abby is a graduate of the University of Maryland, Robert H. Smith School of Business, where she earned a Master of Business Administration degree. She also holds a B.B.A. (cum laude) in Business Administration from the University of San Diego.
PsychArmor Resource of the Week
The PsychArmor Resource of the Week is the PsychArmor course, Supporting Veteran-Owned Businesses: Supplier Diversity, In this course, you will learn strategies and best practices to implement Veteran supplier diversity in your business or organization. You can find a link to the resource here: https://learn.psycharmor.org/courses/Supporting-Veteran-Owned-Businesses.
Theme Music
Our theme music Don’t Kill the Messenger was written and performed by Navy Veteran Jerry Maniscalco, in cooperation with Operation Encore, a non profit committed to supporting singer/songwriter and musicians across the military and Veteran communities.
This Episode Sponsored By:
This episode is sponsored by PsychArmor, the premier education and learning ecosystem specializing in military culture content. PsychArmor offers an online e-learning laboratory with custom training options for organizations.
Producer and Host Duane France is a retired Army Noncommissioned Officer, combat veteran, and clinical mental health counselor for service members, veterans, and their families. You can find more about the work that he is doing at www.veteranmentalhealth.com
