About The Founder

Michele Holleran, founder of DeArment, is the chairperson of Leadership AAHSA and serves on the faculty of this year-long leadership development program. She holds her PhD in Organization and Management, specializing in leadership studies, and an MBA from The Pennsylvania State University. She has offered workshops and presentations on the topics of leadership and culture change throughout the United States and in Europe at the IAHSA conference. Michele founded DeArment Consulting in memory of her late father-in-law, Bert DeArment Holleran, who inspired her to take risks and begin her first company, Holleran Consulting, LLC.

Michele Holleran founded Holleran Consulting, LLC (also known as "Holleran") in 1992. It was her interest in the quality improvement movement that prompted her to study and practice the concepts of customer satisfaction, concepts she introduced to the aging services field. Since beginning Holleran, customer satisfaction measurement and best practice development have become standards for the field, and are deeply imbedded in AAHSA's Quality First initiative, now five years old. Michele served on the Quality First task force, and as a faculty member, delivering presentations primarily about Achieving Public Trust, one of the tenets of Quality First. Today, the Holleran database of satisfaction scores is the largest CCRC (Continuing Care Retirement Community) database in the world, with benchmarks that allow CCRCs to compare against the most innovative aging services providers in the country. Along with satisfaction research, Holleran also is active in the community health improvement movement, and conducts full-fledged community health assessments for health departments, hospitals and United Ways throughout the United States.