Donna Worthington works with boards and leadership teams at the intersection of risk, strategy, governance, culture and transformation.
What makes her different isn't the breadth of that experience. It's what she does with it.
She brings the technical rigour to design and interrogate risk and governance frameworks with real depth, combined with the human capability to sit with a board through genuine complexity and uncertainty. Most advisors bring one or the other. In practice, boards need both and they rarely find them in the same person.
That combination didn't happen by accident.
She grew up on the land in rural Australia, where you learned early to read systems - the weather, the markets, the family. How a shift in one place sent ripples somewhere else. How the whole thing had its own logic if you paid close enough attention. Those instincts, to sense what's unsaid and to sit with uncertainty, have shaped everything that followed.
What followed was twenty-five years at the hard end of risk and governance. CommBank, MinterEllison, PwC, Zurich - the kind of institutions where the problems are real, the stakes are high, and there is nowhere to hide if you get it wrong.
She was the person called upon when something had broken or was about to. Culture transformation after Royal Commissions. Risk frameworks built under regulatory scrutiny. Remediation programs that needed both technical precision and the ability to navigate complex stakeholder expectations.
The work that still sits with her most is establishing the first Risk Advisory practice inside a law firm in Australia. Nobody had done it; there was no template. It was an opportunity to create something new in the Australian Professional Services Industry.
In 2023, Donna founded Elevare Advisory. A boutique practice that brings all of that to bear without the overhead or the junior team doing the actual work.
What has always driven her is curiosity about how things work. Not just risk systems or governance structures. But living systems, human systems and the patterns that show up everywhere once you know how to look for them. She has studied information systems, coaching science, nutritional science, the polycrisis, regenerative and living systems. Different disciplines, same question underneath all of them: what does it take for something to genuinely thrive?
She holds coaching qualifications and has served as Chair and board member across education and the arts. She writes thought leadership, poetry, essays at the edges of what we know because some questions don't fit inside a framework. They need a different kind of language.
What Donna uniquely offers is this:
The technical depth to interrogate what most advisors accept at face value. The human capability and adaptive leadership skills to create the conditions in which boards and leaders can navigate the unprecedented challenges of our times. And the instinct which has built over a lifetime of reading systems, to sense what is emerging before it becomes a problem.
She knows what it feels like to navigate complexity without a clear map. To hold uncertainty without the luxury of waiting it out. To sit in a room where the hardest thing isn't solving the problem, it's getting people safe enough to name it.
Donna is based in Brisbane and works nationally and internationally.
Donna is supported by a team of senior risk, compliance and governance professionals. They bring decades of experience in industry and consulting having held positions as Chief Risk Officer, Chief Compliance Officer, Company Secretary and served on Boards.
