SYNERGY - Juneteenth 2022

Donald Wilburn

Story By: Heather Lustig-Curran

My biggest thing right now is that I get to touch people,” Donald “Pops” Wilburn told me toward the end of our interview. He leaned close toward the camera (we were on a Zoom call) and his eyes closed. A moment passed as he collected his thoughts and then he continued, “Touching people is so rewarding. To do what God told me to do is the most rewarding thing in my life.”

A field manager for Keller Williams Team Dynamo, a real estate company in Gainesville, Donald strives for one thing: to help the client in any way possible. If you’ve ever sold your home or moved into a new home, you know the exhausting, frustrating, and, at times, painful process this can be. Donald’s goal as part of the Team Dynamo group is to ensure that those three descriptions are emotions you will never experience.

Donald is described as a “tireless servant,” a man who is gifted with “uplift- ing” people, no matter who they are. As the field manager, he interacts and helps every single client throughout the home buying/selling process, and he does so with a selfless, humble spirit. In 2020, when he had an emergency triple-bypass heart surgery, Donald did all he could to raise the spirits of the medical professionals caring for him.

“The reason I feel that God put me in that circumstance was to fulfill his will,” Donald said. “And that was because these people serve everybody all the time and they’re really [not thanked]. So when I got there with the love that I have for God, I just thought about spreading that love throughout the surgical ICU. They were laughing, joking every day. To this day, we still stay in contact.”

Rising from humble beginnings can be difficult or even feel impossible. With the world always trying to bring people down, it might feel easy to give in or, worse, give up. But Donald defies any and all obstacles that could have kept him from succeeding and, in the process of doing so, caring for and building up those around him.

Raised in a New York City “ghetto,” Donald grins as he describes how “I had a wonderful childhood. I had like 30-40 mothers because everybody was your mother in the projects.”

Following his high school graduation, Donald joined the Air Force and worked as military police (“Air Police” in the Air Force world). Stationed in England for three years before returning to New York, Donald intended on joining the New York City police department, but a freeze on the academy hindered that dream. But rising once more, he worked with Holmes Security, a private policing firm. Starting as a guard, Donald was promoted to dispatcher and then to different managerial positions until downsizing in the 1990’s necessitated a career change.

For roughly three years, Donald worked for Brinks security until he received a phone call from his son, Craig which was a lifechanging moment.

“He said, ‘You know, God told me you’re supposed to be in Florida,’” Donald recounted. Humorously, when Craig explained that Donald was intended to be in Gainesville, Donald’s first response was “‘Gain Who?’”

But much like Samuel in the temple, Donald answered and followed the Lord’s will. For some, this might seem strange, the idea of a man in a successful career living in his home city to uproot himself and move to a city he didn’t know existed. But Donald had turned his life over to Christ.

“Jesus appeared to me in a dream that changed my life,” Donald said. “The Lord said to me that I could follow Satan and have everything I want or I can follow Him in everything else and my life will be permanent and have a life everlasting through Him.”

Donald woke up the next morning as a changed man. He explained that before he was called, he had sold drugs and beaten up people. But the dream made him into a new man, one who answered the directive to move to Florida.

Moving to Gainesville was another tier in Donald’s growth. He started attending Craig’s weekly Bible studies and, “slowly but surely, I started inheriting all these young men. At that time they were all like 18,19 years-old, you know. They gravitated toward me. So that fired me up. These guys needed spiritual training and what got me the most is that as years went by, I started meeting their parents. They always introduced me as ‘Pops.’”

With a new name, a new career, a new home, and a new “spiritual” family, Donald continues to do all he can to offer others hope and love. His gift of “Uplifting people” transforms the exhausted workers in an ICU during the opening months of the Covid pandemic. He guides people into their new homes. And he gave this humble writer laughter and then peace.