For this hospital administrator, DEI is more than a concept — it’s the story of his life’s journey, and he’s passionate about spreading the word

Twenty years ago, an 18-year-old Joseph Bynum thought he would be the next big rapper. 

A teen in Brooklyn, Bynum had just started a music production company, The Movement. He had decided to take a gap year after his graduation from high school. While playing basketball one day, he ran into a friend who had spent the last few months in a college upstate on a certificate to work with X-rays. 

Several years later, with his wife now pregnant with their second child and him working as a patient transporter at a Brooklyn hospital, the interaction with his friend still lingered in the back of his mind. He decided he needed a career, something that could support his family. He would go to school to work with X-rays.  

Now 38, Bynum is the director of imaging services at Peconic Bay Medical Center in Riverhead. As he reflects back on that time in his life and his career’s development, he gives the most credit to the people along the way who recognized his potential and supported him to evolve into a leader.

Bynum spoke Thursday during Riverhead High School’s Black History Month celebration.

“I just really want to share what my true purpose and passion has been, and it’s really been centered around equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging,” Bynum said in an interview with RiverheadLOCAL on Wednesday. “Because that’s been my story, and the people I’ve connected with on this journey were people who were brave enough to really want to see someone succeed and really have an impact on my life.”

Aside from his job as a director at the East End’s largest hospital, Bynum is the co-chair of Northwell’s Bridges BERG (Business Employee Resource Group), which promotes the cultural celebration and career development of Northwell staff. 

He said his current focus as BERG co-chair is to engage Northwell employees in eastern Suffolk County, including at Peconic Bay Medical Center. 

Bynum, who now lives in Wheatley Heights, joined Northwell Health in 2020, just as the pandemic started, as an imaging services manager at the Long Island Jewish Valley Stream hospital. He helped develop Northwell’s diversity, equity and inclusion committee, which was recognized last year with a Northwell Health President’s Award.

Bynum’s interest in DEI came from other administrators at Long Island Jewish Valley Stream, he said. “It was me sitting in the office with an Irish chief financial officer and two other Caucasian colleagues who were just as equally interested in getting a [DEI] committee off the ground in the hospital,” he said. “I wasn’t even in a room with anyone who looks like me, but just people believing in me, showing equal effort and passion, is really where that came from.” 

Bynum passion for DEI fits with a message school administrators want to deliver to district students. The school district assembled its own DEI committee last year — a move sparked by incidents including racial slurs being hurled at young Black children during a football game and the appearance of swastikas drawn on school furniture. The new DEI committee helped to organize Thursday’s Black History Month celebration.  

In 2021, Bynum helped organize Northwell’s Black History Month celebration and its first Juneteenth celebration. He recalled the Juneteenth event, in which employees put on a theatrical performance on the history of a prominent Black American. Bynum chose Buck Colbert Franklin, the attorney who helped defend the rights of the survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. 

Bynum has also coordinated mentorship programs between Northwell doctors and minority students interested in becoming doctors. He recalls experiences with his own mentors: the hospital administrators in Brooklyn who adjusted his schedule to allow him to take classes to become an x-ray technologist; the program director at a hospital where he worked that gave him his first teaching job; and the pastor of his church who showed him “what black excellence looks like,” among others. (Bynum is also an ordained deacon at the Friendship Baptist Church of Roslyn.)

He received his certificate from Cornell University in diversity and inclusion in 2022 at the encouragement of his peers at Valley Stream. With it, he teaches a monthly class for Northwell employees on inclusive leadership and is developing the health system’s first ever course on cultural intelligence. 

In November 2022, Bynum joined PBMC as director of imaging services. As a Black man and millennial in a leadership position, Bynum said he gets acknowledgements from other people of color and young people while walking the halls of the Riverhead hospital. 

“It means a lot to see someone who looks like you in a room. It’s like an unspoken body language that you’re able to connect and just say ‘I’m proud of you,’” Bynum said.

“I didn’t have those examples coming up,” Bynum said. “So I’m kind of like creating my own lane for my children, as well.”

Bynum said he wants to be a “disruptive thinker,” borrowing the phrase from the title of prominent Black preacher T.D. Jakes’ latest book. “Even just as an African American-Caribbean, I want to leave that legacy behind, that Joe was passionate, he was authentic, he was genuine, he was a servant, he was a great leader,” Bynum said.

A few years ago, Bynum ran into the same friend who had turned him on to going to X-ray school. His friend didn’t remember that day, though Bynum always would.

“It’s just people coming into my life and — I don’t know, man. I suppose I’m blessed,” Bynum said.