Biography

Matthew C. Whitaker, Ph.D. is the Founder and CEO of Diamond Strategies, LLC., a premier, trend-setting, and award-winning (2022 Best of Tempe Consultant Award), Better Business Bureau A+ rated, NSDMC certified Minority Business Enterprise (MBE). We are an organizational excellence, social responsibility, and community engagement firm, that helps your clients build cohesive, innovative, equitable, and sustainable environments, while promoting corporate citizenship and community impact. We also offer exemplary organizational audit, strategic planning, leadership coaching, employee training and team building opportunities, and Interest-Based-Resolution (IBR) services, to Fortune 500 companies, non-profits, government, and educational institutions in the United States, Africa, Australia, Canada, China, and Europe.

In addition, we provide leadership and learning opportunities in interpersonal and intercultural communication, through a combination of one-on-one interventions, focus groups, workshops, retreats, symposia, and other activities designed to provide the knowledge, skills, sensitivity, and resources organizations need to forge and maintain healthy and equitable cultures of collaboration, innovation, efficiency, and productivity. Our specialties also include including industry-leading Training-of-Trainers, (TOT), transformative community relations consulting, and thought leadership. Our skilled team, combined with first-rate analytics and data-driven technology, will help your organization close gaps and move the “people performance” and corporate responsibility needle across your ecosystem.

Dr. Whitaker is also Executive Director of the George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center in Phoenix. He is an award-winning educator, author, community engagement specialist, motivational speaker, and founder of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, winner of the 2014 Arizona Diversity Leadership Alliance (DLA) Inclusive Workplace Award, at Arizona State University, where was a professor of history for 15 years.  Dr. Whitaker earned a B.A. in Sociology, B.A. in History, and an M.A. in History, at Arizona State University. He earned a Ph.D. in History, with honors, at Michigan State University, and recently completed an Executive Certification Program in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Cornell University.

Dr. Whitaker founded Diamond Strategies, L.L.C. in May of 2016, to operationalize what he had long done in his writings, classrooms, speeches and service to the business, non-profit, and municipal worlds, use his unique sociological and historical training (most IDEA professionals have transactional business and HR backgrounds or clinical training) to help individuals, organizations, and communities, learn and leverage our diverse past and present to promote healing, social cohesion, productivity and profitability. He is deeply authentic in style and delivery and utilizes his diverse familial background to reach and teach those who have more homogeneous experiences.

For these efforts, he was given Arizona Diversity Leadership Alliance’s 2016 Diversity and Inclusion Leader Award, and the Arizona Collectors 2020 Frederick Douglass Social Justice Award.  He specializes in U.S. history, comparative Black history and life, civil rights, race relations, social movements, diversity, equity, and inclusion.  He has edited three books, including Hurricane Katrina: America’s Unnatural Disaster, and he is the author of Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West.  He has also authored award-winning articles, penned over 40 opinion pieces, and is currently completing a memoir entitled The Undisputed Truth: A Revolutionary Journey to Black Manhood.  

Dr. Whitaker has consulted, spoken, and lectured in Australia, Canada, China, Czech Republic, England, Ghana, and Ireland.  Has been featured on CNN, NPR, PBS, WVON, KEMET, and was given ASU’s 2015 Pioneer Award for working to improve African American life, community and culture.  He is also a co-founder of the Healing Racism Public Dialogue Series, winner of the 2008 National League of Cities Promoting Inclusive Award, and he was given the City of Phoenix 2006 Martin Luther King, Jr. Living the Dream Award.  He is a trustee of AZCEND, and can be followed on Twitter @DrWhitakeronX, Instagram @drmcw, and LinkedIn @drmatthewcwhitaker. Diamond Strategies can be follow on Twitter @dstrategiesllc, Instagram @dstrategiesllc, and LinkedIn @diamondstrategiesllc.