ABOUT/Paula Toledo

Bridging Well-being, Creativity, and Connection

Ode to Wonder designs cultures where wonder restores presence, connection, and the courage to lead and create.

Founded by artist and well-being strategist Paula Toledo (B.Comm, MAPP), Ode to Wonder helps leaders and organizations move from fragmented well-being efforts to cohesive, evidence-based strategies that nurture social, mental, and creative health. Paula partners with leadership teams to build and implement organizational well-being plans and culture frameworks, then brings them to life through immersive experiences of awe, art, and story.

Her approach bridges science with authentic intelligence through her awethentIQ@work™ framework —grounded in research and expressed through human connection so that organizations not only perform better but feel alive again.

She holds a Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied with Dr. Martin Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology.

With a background in marketing and product innovation for Fortune 500 companies, Paula bridges analytical insight with creative intelligence, translating evidence-based research into strategies that rehumanize the workplace by elevating our human strengths and what she refers to as our authentic intelligence.

Science, Art, and Social Change

Her work lives at the intersection of science, art, and social change, applying evidence-based well-being and creative engagement to transform individual and societal health.

As Lead Well-being Consultant at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Paula is pioneering the use of art prescriptions to advance mental and social health, helping to shape one of Canada’s most forward-thinking healthcare models for collective well-being. She also integrates methods from Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS)—a practice used in medical and museum education to cultivate empathy, perception, and reflective awareness—into her leadership and well-being programs.

She helps organizations transform disconnection into cultures of awe, belonging, and creative renewal.

A Life Shaped by Creativity and Connection

Paula’s perspective was shaped by two transformational experiences that revealed the healing power of creativity and belonging.

“Sixteen years ago, I lost my husband to a mental-health crisis. In the weeks that followed, I remember sitting in a rocking chair in the middle of the night—nursing my newborn while my toddler slept. I felt deep despair but a sense of reassurance that connected me to something larger than myself. My newborn son and I soothed one another. I was giving him life, and my love for him was giving me life. The air was cold, and everything inside me was raw. And in that moment, I realized something that would later define my life’s work: if life can collapse in an instant, it can also transform in an instant. Awe and anguish coexist.

After being prescribed art through a social-health initiative to help heal my loneliness and grief, I experienced firsthand how creative expression and community connection can nurture recovery and resilience.

Years later, when my creative work seemed lost and I’d begun doubting myself, strangers across the world rediscovered a song of mine, one that had vanished. For sixteen years, they’d been searching for it together, building a small community around something that connected them without knowing me or one another. These experiences remind me what the research confirms: awe, story, and artistry can bridge time, distance, and our human strengths.”

Paula’s song was featured in Rolling Stone Magazine as one of the most searched-for songs in the history of the internet, and reaffirmed to her that art had quietly been doing what she believed it could and that beauty and connection are never gone, they’re simply waiting to be seen again.

That is what Ode to Wonder brings to organizations: the capacity to see anew, to reconnect, to remember our shared humanity even in uncertainty.

Purpose and Practice

Through Ode to Wonder, Paula continues to help organizations and communities buffer burnout through creativity, transform loneliness into belonging, and reimagine workplaces as spaces of meaningful human connection and collective renewal.

Her work affirms that well-being is both personal and collective — and that leadership begins when we remember what it means to be fully human, together.