Dr. Denise O’Neil Green is an award-winning, visionary and internationally recognized expert in organizational change, transformational leadership, equity and social accountability with 30 years of experience. As a global thought leader, she has worked across various sectors, including post-secondary education, government, business, and healthcare, as a keynote speaker, innovative strategist, educator and changemaker.
In March 2022, she launched Denise O’Neil Green Consulting. As President and Principal Consultant of Denise O’Neil Green Consulting, she uses her professional and lived experiences to coach and empower leaders and organizations (i.e. York University – LAPS, Trillium Health Partners, George Brown College – Office of Antiracism, Equity and Human Rights Services, and RBC Bank) to go beyond the performative and be authentic in developing and implementing organizational change strategies to support their people and communities they serve.
From 2023-2024 she served as the Equity and Social Accountability Lead for the Department of Family and Community Medicine (DFCM), Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. This was a time-limited leadership appointment that allowed Dr. Green to work closely with faculty, staff and learners to advance principles of equity and social accountability in a sustained and collaborative way. Following her term, Dr. Green now holds an adjunct lecturer position in DFCM.
As Vice-President, she founded the Division of Equity and Community Inclusion at Toronto Metropolitan University [TMU] (2017-2022) and was the inaugural Assistant Vice-President/Vice Provost, EDI at TMU in 2012, the year she immigrated to Canada from the USA. As Vice-President, she led academic and non-academic activities to address anti-racism, anti-discrimination and anti-ableism. Offices that reported to her included Accessibility/AODA, Human Rights Services, Indigenous Initiatives, Education, Awareness and Outreach, and Research, Planning and Assessment.
Known for being courageous and bold, under Dr. Green’s leadership, TMU convened the first University and Research Funding Agencies’ Equity Officers Roundtable in 2018 in partnership with the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC); under her guidance, TMU brought the first-ever White Privilege Conference Global – Toronto in 2018 with over 600 delegates to discuss how privilege and oppression operate in Canadian society; she co-authored TMU’s Truth and Reconciliation Community Consultation Report, which provided the foundation for the institution’s strategic plan and reconciliation journey onward; and she led a team that developed an All Gender Washroom campaign ensuring accessibility to everyone on the campus. With Dr. Green championing major inclusive causes such as these, TMU maintained its designation as one of Canada’s Best Diversity Employers for five consecutive years from 2014 to 2019 and made the Forbes’ 2022 List for Canada’s Best Employers for Diversity.
Before TMU, Dr. Green was the Associate Vice-President of Institutional Diversity at Central Michigan University (CMU) for five years. During her tenure at CMU, she advanced curricular initiatives and secured over 1.5 million in grant funding for student success programs. She worked with local community organizations, including the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal College, to spearhead equity initiatives. In the fall of 2011, she opened the Center for Student Inclusion and Diversity, a modern, state-of-the-art facility to showcase belonging initiatives and programming.
Dr. Green has co-authored The Case for Affirmative Action on Campus: Concepts of Equity, Considerations for Practice and 100 Accomplished Black Canadian Women, editions 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024 and 2026 (forthcoming). She has authored/co-authored over 90 journal articles, book chapters, reports, conference papers and lectures. She is the Creator and Executive Editor of the Institutional Diversity Blog (IDB), a comprehensive website covering EDI aspects to drive culture change. Since its inception in 2012, the blog has reached over 100 countries and has been listed as a leading reference source. Feedspot also ranked IDB 4th among the 20 Best DEI blogs to follow in 2026.
She has received numerous awards and honours, including the inaugural 2022 Women Executive Network MLSE Equity Diversity and Inclusion Leaders Award and the 2022 Honorary Viola Desmond Award from TMU. In 2021, she was named among the inaugural Top International 100 Inspirational Diversity and Inclusion Leaders by d&i leaders in the UK. She also received the 2017 Association for the Study of Higher Education Council on Ethnic Participation Founders’ Service Award and the 2016 Pioneers for Change Award for Excellence in Women in Leadership.
Dr. Green serves on the St. Mike’s Hospital Academic Family Health Team Board and was formerly on the Unity Health Toronto Board of Directors from 2018 to 2024.
She is an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. Dr. Green was an Associate Professor in the Graduate Faculty of the Department of Leadership, Adult & Higher Education and the Department of Social Justice Education, OISE (Status-Only Professor), University of Toronto, from 2020 to 2025. She was an Associate Professor at the School of Child and Youth Care in the Faculty of Community Services at TMU and faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her scholarship has focused on race-conscious policies in higher education, student access, qualitative research methodologies and EDI.
Dr. Green holds a PhD. in Education with a focus on Higher Education and Public Policy from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, a Master in Public Affairs from Princeton University and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago.