Dela Wilson, Founder and CEO
Dela is a strategist and social entrepreneur powering [k]new ways of wellbeing. She is the founder and CEO of Axle Impact Studio, a social innovation studio fusing futurism and behavioral science through impact, experience and product design. Axle houses frameworks, activations and ventures including due goodies – a nonprofit translating the promotional products sales into restorative grants for womxn of color; and Reparation.ai – a global database and VR tool empowering movements for reconciliation and repair.
A lawyer and policy analyst by training, she chose entrepreneurship early-on as a personal protest to archaic form. Logic could not unearth the illogical systems of injustice. Instead, creativity bore the strongest vessel for shift in thought – and later, behavior. Building organizations from inception allowed her creativity to flourish, and she translated skills in non-profit management into Axle’s advisory support of impact, experience and product design. To date, Axle has powered shifts in team culture, content and brand strategy, market research and modeling, and product development for PushBlack, Etsy, the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation, JP Morgan Chase’s Advancing Black Pathways Initiative, the United Negro College Fund’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and the Moleskine Foundation.
As a writer, Dela published Black Founders at Work to chart the leadership journeys of technologists from their first investment to acquisition. She is building upon this to explore how creativity and imagination are cultivated and sustained amongst first-generation populations.
Dela was the inaugural Inclusive Innovation Fellow at Georgetown Law’s Tech Institute, a Social Entrepreneur in Residence at USC Marshall School of Business, and has been previously recognized as HBCUvc’s 31 Under 31 for the Future of Venture Capital. She is currently a Senior Fellow for Racial Equity and Global Fellow for the Atlantic Institute. With lineage woven through African descendants displaced across the Alabama Black Belt and the Haliwa-Saponi tribe of Hollister, North Carolina, Dela is a first-generation graduate of Spelman College, Harvard University and Georgetown Law.