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Michelle Yuen Blanco thought Hispanic Executive had initially contacted the wrong person. The associate general counsel at NewYork-Presbyterian grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, where her family was one of the very few Chinese American households in a primarily Italian American neighborhood. People never hesitated to point out that Blanco’s family, and Blanco herself, didn’t look like the rest of the neighborhood. But that fact alone isn’t why you’ll find her in Hispanic Executive.
Blanco was on the heels of celebrating her tenth wedding anniversary and the birth of her second child with her Colombian and Spanish husband at the time of writing. And Blanco says it’s her attorney husband who should be credited for convincing her of why she belongs in Hispanic Executive.
“He said, ‘Michelle, this is amazing,’” Blanco recalls. “‘You’re the ultimate ally. This is perfect for you.’”
Blanco’s résumé is stacked. She attended NYU for her undergraduate degree and Cardozo School of Law. After gaining litigation experience in mass tort, product liability, labor law, and a general smattering of other issues, the attorney moved into healthcare.
As a commercial litigator at Nixon Peabody LLP, she represented academic medical centers, teaching hospitals, hospital systems, and providers in a broad range of work. She then moved in-house as associate general counsel and assistant secretary to the board to NewYork-Presbyterian Queens, a regional hospital in the NewYork-Presbyterian system for five years before assuming her associate GC role for the broader enterprise.
During her time at NewYork-Presbyterian, Blanco has been chair of the inclusion group for the healthcare system’s corporate center, which promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion, provides regular programming for heritage months, and creates a safe space for difficult conversations. Prior to this role, she chaired the DEI group at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens—a position she
initially hesitated to accept.
“I’m the lawyer,” Blanco says, laughing. “I thought they should seek out someone in another department. But I was told that people trust me and that I’m easy to connect with. And in creating that kind of environment, we’ve found an increase in loyalty and trust among our people.”
Blanco says chairing these groups has given her the unique opportunity to bridge gaps between C-suite leaders and frontline employees while engaging in critical, often difficult, conversations. It’s a diverse group talking about a variety of complex issues in a space that encourages openness and empathy. The associate GC says she relishes the opportunity of providing a pathway for a wide swath of people to tell their stories. To learn the good, the bad, and the challenging behind the titles and job descriptions.
“Personally, I know what it means to overcome the burden of discrimination and how that has created a lens through which I’ve seen the rest of my life,” Blanco says. “My work now is about helping others utilize those difficult moments to become their best selves and truly shine. I want to help people to overcome those moments in their lives that often act as roadblocks to personal development and growth.”
Blanco explains that overcoming adversity made her seek out more opportunities and become the person she is today. But she acknowledges that for others, responses to trauma and inhumane treatment can stir up violence, anger, hurt, betrayal, and other emotions that have to be acknowledged and healed before they can move on.
Now the mother of two biracial children, Blanco wonders how they will identify and what impact their parents’ examples and lives will have on their trajectory. The Blanco children have a mother who volunteered as a teen at a local Brooklyn hospital in high school to translate for Chinese and Hispanic patients, advocated for LGBTQ+ youth in New York’s West Village during college, and spent a significant period of her law school career working at the Innocence Project.
Blanco knows that not everyone has equal access to opportunities, and she understands her children may face the same discrimination that she did growing up. But she believes in what hard work, healing, and motivation can do to overcome the inequities many Americans encounter daily.
That’s a big part of the reason Blanco is at NewYork-Presbyterian and why she was initially drawn to her role at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens, a community hospital serving a primarily Asian and Hispanic patient demographic. The hospital, located in Flushing, Queens, reflected so much of her own identity and life experience, and serving the community gave her legal work a higher purpose. The hospital also happened to be where her husband was born thirty years prior. Life truly has a way of coming full circle.
As for NewYork-Presbyterian, Blanco says, “I would argue that this is a premier health institution in New York. To be part of an organization that has the resources to provide such an incomparable level of care to all patients—and is proactively taking steps to address systemic inequalities—motivates the work I do every single day.”
Blanco specifically praises the leadership of Dr. Steven Corwin, the president and CEO of NewYork-Presbyterian. Corwin took the murder of George Floyd in 2020 as a direct mandate to create a place for employees to feel safe and heard, talk about issues that were affecting them, and tackle topics previously left outside the workplace.
“Dr. Corwin had the vision of the inclusion group as a place where those conversations could be had,” Blanco explains. “Sometimes those conversations are positive and celebratory. Sometimes they are difficult and melancholy and make you wonder about the state of the world. But we need space for both.”
