Elizabeth Anne Wood, Ph.D.

The hardest changes are the ones that touch mortality — our own, or someone we love. A serious diagnosis. A parent who is dying. A caregiving role that arrived before you felt ready. Grief that doesn’t follow the cultural script we’ve been given.

When you’re in the midst of these situations, well-meaning advice often falls short. What you need is someone who can sit with the weight of what you’re experiencing, help you figure out what matters most right now, and give you permission — when you need it — to not be at your best.

I also work with people navigating changes in identity and relationship: a change related to gender or sexuality, the end of a significant relationship, the loss of a role that once felt like your life’s whole purpose.

What these situations share is that they represent significant revisions to your story. That’s frightening, and it’s also an opening. Every major change is an opportunity to write a new chapter in your life. Where do you want to take the plot?

Academic and professional life has its own version of impermanence. We work through advanced degrees or training programs, promotion processes, professional development and research agendas — and each stage feels life-consuming and then ends and morphs into something else. Our institutions shift under our feet as well, often in the name of efficiency and in ways that can be disorienting at best and demoralizing much more of the time. Technological developments force changes in our ways of working, sometimes faster than we feel like we can keep up. And then comes the moment when we decide to leave a career that has felt like a life’s mission.

I spent 25 years in higher education. I know what it feels like when the institutional scaffolding that has organized your life starts to shift. I work with academics and professionals at exactly those inflection points: not to tell you what to do, but to help you think more clearly about what you actually want, and what’s getting in the way.

Organizations hire me when they’re navigating transitions that involve culture, communication, or the human terrain that most consultants sidestep. I bring a sociological framework, more than a decade of direct consulting experience, and a patient, persistent approach to problems that can be hard to talk about.

I work on organizational culture, communications strategy, and values integration — helping senior living communities, healthcare organizations, and even hospices increase death literacy, decrease death phobia, and support staff and clients alike in navigating their relationships with mortality.

I also work with mission-driven nonprofits on messaging, framing, and strategic planning, particularly around sensitive or stigmatized topics. In all of these instances my goal is to support organizations in creating cultures and processes that allow them to live their values and fulfill their missions as fully as possible.

For over sixteen years I’ve served as Senior Strategist with the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, the nation’s only human rights organization working full time to affirm sexual freedom as a fundamental human right, with a focus on message framing in politically complex environments.

Organizational consulting is project-based — from a single facilitated session to a multi-month partnership.