There’s something deeply paradoxical about how we approach social change in America. The more urgent our problems become, the more we retreat into silos. Democracy reformers work in isolation from racial justice organizers. Climate activists rarely coordinate with voting rights groups. Everyone competes for the same grants while barely communicating with each other about overlapping solutions.
Julia Roig has spent 30 years noticing these artificial boundaries—and more importantly, understanding why they persist and what it costs us. As the founder and Chief Network Weaver of The Horizons Project, she is part of an awesome experiment on reimagining how we organize for systemic change.
What makes Julia’s approach fascinating isn’t just that she’s advocating for collaboration. It’s how she’s thinking systematically about the psychological and structural forces that keep us siloed, even when we know better. And her background gives her a unique vantage point: she spent 13 years as CEO of PartnersGlobal, one of the major international development organizations working on democratic governance worldwide, with extensive fieldwork rebuilding institutions after conflict in places like Belgrade, Serbia.
Four years ago, she made a striking pivot. She left that traditional nonprofit CEO role to start something much smaller, more experimental, and explicitly designed around “network weaving.” And she’s doing this work through a fiscal sponsorship rather than a traditional 501(c)(3), a choice that reveals how deeply she’s thought about the structural constraints that influence nonprofit behavior!
The Certainty Trap
One of the most compelling insights from our conversation for me was Julia’s diagnosis of why silos persist even among well-intentioned people. It’s not just funding structures or mission creep—though those matter. It’s something more fundamental: our psychological need for certainty in chaotic times.
“We need certainty,” Julia explained. “Especially in the most chaotic times, our brains, our whole psyche, is drawn to certainty that our solution for what’s most needed right now is the right one.” This creates what she calls a kind of cognitive bias where acknowledging uncertainty about our approach—or considering how our work might fit with others’—literally hurts our brains.
Think about what this means practically. If you’ve been working on democracy reform for 12 years and someone suggests your approach needs to integrate with racial justice organizing, you’re not just being asked to broaden your strategy. You’re being asked to question the foundation of what you’ve been doing. That’s genuinely threatening to our sense of professional identity and effectiveness.
This analysis helps explain why even the most collaborative-minded organizations struggle with ecosystem thinking.
What If That Young Organizer Has a Point?
Julia’s honesty about the structural problems facing the nonprofit sector was refreshing. When a young organizer told her colleague he was “cynical about the NGO industrial complex” and didn’t want to be part of formal nonprofit structures, Julia’s response was simple: “He is not wrong.”
This isn’t anti-institutional nihilism but is more about getting clear-eyed recognition that professionalization creates its own problems. Julia was involved in building the field of peacebuilding as a profession, and she’s proud of that work. But she also recognizes the unintended consequences: “The more that you professionalize a field, then there is a demarcation of who’s in and who’s out.”
Credentialing, conferences, field-building—all of these create necessary infrastructure, but they also create barriers. They can separate the “professionals” from the “real work” happening on the ground. Julia’s decision to structure The Horizons Project as a fiscally sponsored initiative rather than a traditional nonprofit reflects this tension. She wants the benefits of institutional support without the constraints of institutional thinking.
The Mediation Model for Movement Building
Julia’s background in transformative mediation offers a powerful framework for thinking about network weaving. In transformative mediation, the mediator doesn’t try to direct parties toward a specific solution. Instead, they hold space and ask provocative questions that help parties figure out their own path forward.
This approach requires a particular kind of emotional discipline. As Julia put it: “You don’t take so much on your shoulders and actually meet people as adults to own what’s happening in their environment.” When tensions arise in a coalition or network, instead of rushing to fix things, the network weaver might ask: “How is this working for you right now? Is this okay? Is this productive?”
This model suggests that effective network weaving isn’t about being the person who holds all the tensions together—it’s about creating conditions where others can work through tensions themselves. It’s a fundamentally different approach to leadership that prioritizes facilitation over direction.
The implications for coalition building are significant. Instead of trying to align everyone around a single strategy, network weavers help different groups understand how their distinct approaches might reinforce each other, even when they’re not formally coordinated.
Slowing Down When Everything Feels Urgent
Perhaps the most counterintuitive aspect of Julia’s approach is her insistence on relationship-building when everything feels urgent. We both drew on Bayo Akomolafe’s phrase “The times are urgent; let us slow down,” and Julia argues that prioritizing relational infrastructure isn’t a luxury—it’s literally the only way to build movements capable of sustained effectiveness.
“Change happens through the relationships that we invest in,” Julia said. “It really matters who you’re doing it with and the fact that you will be together to then fight another day.”
This isn’t soft-skills romanticism. Julia’s mentor taught her this lesson when she took over PartnersGlobal in 2008: “It actually doesn’t matter what you’re working on and what you accomplish together. It really matters who you’re doing it with.” And I just love that reminder.
But building trust takes longer than we think. Julia insists on investing time in activities that might feel tangential to “the real work”—getting silly, using different sides of your brain to connect as human beings. People sometimes get impatient to get to the strategy part, but she’s learned that this foundation pays off in ways that purely transactional approaches cannot.
The challenge is that this approach can feel irresponsible when crises demand immediate action. Julia acknowledges this tension: “we can be very transactional when things feel urgent—bring the group together and it’s ‘What are you doing? This is what I’m doing,’ asks, offers, strategic plan, go.”
Her response isn’t to dismiss urgency but to reframe it. If we’re going to be effective over the long term, we have to invest in the infrastructure that makes sustained collaboration possible. This requires “discernment”—the ability to sense when to slow down for relationship building and when to move quickly on tactical coordination.
Gex X, Meet Gen Z
One of the most honest parts of our conversation was Julia’s reflection on intergenerational dynamics in leadership. As a 55-year-old Gen X leader, she’s experienced firsthand the tensions that have led many of her peers to leave the sector.
“I have struggled,” she said. “I wanna just name that—that it’s not like ‘Oh, we’ve got so much to learn.’ It was like I felt personally like not supported or understood at certain times, like how hard it was to be a leader in the nonprofit sector.”
But rather than dismissing generational change as unrealistic, Julia advocates for what she calls “intergenerational partnership.” She pushes back against both the “let the young people lead” narrative and the defensive response of older leaders. Instead, she focuses on the question of discernment: “When to step forward and step back—this is a discernment that we’re just having a hard—this is a hard thing to discern.”
This perspective feels particularly relevant as the sector grapples with rapid turnover and changing expectations about workplace culture. Julia’s approach suggests that the answer isn’t to choose sides but to develop better practices for navigating difference across generations—which, by the way, requires exactly the kind of relational infrastructure she advocates for in other contexts!
Living with Uncertainty as a Core Competency
Throughout our conversation, Julia kept returning to uncertainty as both the source of our sector’s problems and the key to its transformation. We want certainty about our strategies, our impact, our role in larger movements. But complex problems—the kind that require ecosystem-level responses—don’t yield to certain solutions.
This is why Julia does so much training and workshops on living with uncertainty and our relationship to uncertainty. It’s not just a nice-to-have skill—it’s essential for the kind of network weaving that our biggest challenges require. And these aren’t one-time strategic planning questions. They’re ongoing practices that require self-reflection and the ability to take feedback and to be “coachable.”
The Hope Infrastructure
Julia ended our conversation with something that stuck with me: “Another key competency for this moment is hope.” Not hope as naive optimism, but hope as a practice rooted in recognizing that “beautiful things are happening too.”
This feels like exactly the kind of infrastructure we need as we face what many are calling the most challenging political moment in recent American history. The question isn’t whether our problems are urgent—they are (duh). The question is whether we’ll respond to that urgency with the kind of strategic patience that builds movements capable of sustained effectiveness.
As Julia put it: “We change when we are in community with peers who will help us.” The relationships we invest in today will determine whether we have the collective capacity to navigate whatever comes next.
Key Themes Explored
The psychological roots of organizational silos and why they persist despite good intentions
How the professionalization of social change work creates unintended barriers
Transformative mediation as a model for network weaving and coalition building
The tension between urgency and the relationship building that sustains movements
Why living with uncertainty is a core competency for complex social problems
Intergenerational partnership as an alternative to generational conflict in leadership
The difference between transactional coordination and transformative collaboration
Hope as infrastructure rather than just a sentiment
Sources and Further Reading
Organizations and Resources:
The Horizons Project - Julia’s network weaving organization focused on pro-democracy peacebuilding. Please please subscribe to their newsletter!
New Venture Fund - Fiscal sponsor providing back-office support for innovative organizing experiments
Alliance for Peacebuilding - Professional association Julia helped build in the field of conflict resolution
Key Concepts and Frameworks:
Transformative Mediation - Approach developed by Robert Baruch Bush focused on empowerment and recognition rather than settlement
Complex vs. Complicated Problems - Distinction between technical challenges with known solutions and adaptive challenges requiring emergent responses
Polarity Management - Framework for working with interdependent opposites rather than trying to choose between them
Network Weaving - Practice of connecting diverse actors to create more resilient and effective ecosystems
Influences and Inspirations:
Bayo Akomolafe - African philosopher and writer whose phrase “The times are urgent; let us slow down” captures the paradox of sustainable change
Sense-making practices - Approaches to understanding complex situations and one’s role within them
Field building theory - Framework for understanding how professional sectors develop and the trade-offs involved
Follow Julia’s Work:
Connect on LinkedIn for updates on network weaving experiments and a ton of valuable resources that keep me inspired and informed!
The Horizons Project for ongoing convenings and coalition building opportunities
Read her recent NPQ article, Block, Bridge, Build: A Framework to Forge a More Democratic Future
