David Moxley
Behavioral and Organizational Health Leader
“My work involves helping people advance their health using their strengths and life aims. And from this we build their resilience.”
Healthy offers me an opportunity to continue my work in advancing positive behavioral health based on strengths and asset building frameworks offering individuals opportunities to progress in improving their own health through tailored and proactive personal strategies. It taps into my interest in collaborating with individuals who care deeply about the advancement of health care, particularly for individuals who face daily challenges in achieving optimal health.
For me, not only is Healthy about collaborating with other health care providers and thought leaders, but it is also about collaborating with users and sponsors who seek innovative ways to bring health promotion into their daily lives, organizations, or communities. Healthy’s partnership and collaborative underpinnings tap into my own experience as an educator, researcher, and organizational development consultant.
I have worked across the globe focusing on integrating health, behavioral health, vocational development, and social services, especially in partnership with people facing physical health and mental health challenges, some of which result in disability calling for creative and innovative solutions to advancing quality of life.
My career involves helping people actuate their potential as distinctive and unique individuals, partnering with them in creating and sustaining person-centered support systems, an aim I share with Healthy. My experience involves creating effective human service organizations from their founding through their rejuvenation or renaissance. I take a value orientation to consulting involving sustained long term strategic partnerships with groups, communities, and organizations in developing sustainable support systems for those individuals who too often struggle with social isolation.
Education is important to me. It has been a consistent highlight of my personal development whether in formal or informal contexts. I believe in action learning in which experience contributes considerably to my insight into how people experience health and behavioral health challenges. As a pracademic, a practioner-academic, I value engaging in dialogue with people who are different from me, especially in the stances they take on issues with which I may not agree. I learn a lot from dialogue, something I gained through my graduate education at Ohio State University (Ph.D.) and Western Michigan University (DPA). I have fine tuned my own approach to learning as an academic and nonprofit administrator where I have held diverse positions as a director and an assistant and associate dean, and full professor in academia and as an executive, researcher, evaluator, and consultant in the nonprofit sector. As in the organizing frame of Healthy, learning through experience and reflection enables me to generate strategies for promoting people’s health. For me, Healthy is about continuous learning to navigate challenges and convert this learning into the wisdom inherent in health promotion.
The red thread connecting this work? My interest involves creating useful practices through action, a principle I share with those collaborators, users, and sponsors who together are building Healthy as an innovative community of inquiry promising possibilities for good health and well-being, individually and collectively.
