Donald Wood
Donald is a purpose-led, systems-oriented, DEI-driven organizational leadership executive and consultant with 18+ years of success in enterprise-wide culture-change management and collective liberation facilitation for clients + partners spanning Fortune 500 companies, health care systems, international aid groups, government agencies, and nonprofits. His approach to servant leadership is as a pragmatic idealist focused on amplifying the voices of the unheard, disrupting the unjust status quo, and acting as a co-conspirator in supporting individuals’ and organizations’ capacity to lead equitably and inclusively.
Donald is the Founder/Senior Consultant of One Eight Create Consulting, a collective of systems-change facilitators who excel at navigating complexity and co-creating ambitious yet attainable visions and roadmaps for equitable, inclusive organizational change and talent development. One Eight Create specializes in delivering individual and group capacity-building experiences that leverage the intersection of systems thinking, strategic communications, and human relations. Donald’s primary role is supporting the development of organizational executives to lead culture change first and foremost with courage, humility and vulnerability. He realizes this is also part of his own leadership journey so he always seeks to act based on his values regardless of the difficulty or cost, to persist and adapt through challenges and failures, and to ensure that truth-seeking, healing, and joy are always embedded throughout any culture change process.
Prior to his current role, Donald led an award-winning Diversity, Equity and Inclusion education and training agency and before that served as chief executive officer of the one of the country’s largest not-for-profit hospice and palliative care foundations, nationally recognized during his time there for its development of innovative health equity initiatives.
Donald grew up in Arkansas and received his undergraduate degree from Westminster College in Missouri. After college he worked as a youth program officer in Southeast Asia before returning to the U.S. to earn a master’s degree in communications–with a focus on civic engagement–from the University of Arkansas, also serving during that time as an AmeriCorps Fellow.
Donald’s also passionate about using his experience, power and privilege to volunteer in his community and on the national level. He has recently served on the Board of Directors for AR Kids Read and the Arkansas Minority Film & Arts Association, and served in leadership roles for the Racial Equity & Hunger National Learning Network and the Arkansas Peace & Justice Memorial Movement.
Donald currently calls northern New Mexico home where he lives with his amazing partner Jennifer and two adorable pups; and he is the overwhelmingly proud dad of a daughter about to graduate college in Chicago.