About Whole Story
From Many Perspectives to Whole Solutions
At Whole Story, we help create spaces, pathways, and capacities for people with diverse perspectives to listen, learn, and work together on complex challenges in ways that build trust and generate lasting solutions.
Whole Story Approach
We believe complex challenges can only be addressed when we see the full picture — the people, perspectives, histories, and systems that shape them. To move from surface-level fixes to lasting solutions, we need ways of working that embrace complexity rather than reducing it. Our approach is grounded in five guiding principles: Whole Self, Whole Perspective, Whole Circle, Whole Time, and Whole Care.
By showing up as our full selves, we honour lived experience and wisdom alongside professional roles. By welcoming many perspectives, we make space for many ways of knowing - whether they are scientific, community-rooted, cultural, or experiential. By seeing the circle, we recognize the interconnection of social, environmental, cultural, and economic systems. By remembering the past as well as imagining the future, we understand challenges and solutions as part of a larger story unfolding through time. And by caring for ourselves and each other, we create a culture of trust, respect, and reciprocity that makes honest collaboration possible.
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Practicing these principles allows us to notice the fuller story behind each challenge: the narratives that guide decision-making, whose voices and experiences are included or excluded, and how systems are interconnected. From this deeper awareness, we can begin to co-create solutions that are more meaningful, inclusive, and lasting.
Acknowledgments
The Whole Story approach draws on multiple ways of knowing, informed by systems thinking, community-based research, engagement, and facilitation practices, and inspired by the guidance of Indigenous knowledge systems where they are shared with us. We recognize that these are not our teachings to claim. Instead, we come with questions and invitations rather than answers, creating space for voices that hold deeper knowledge to be heard; whether they are already in the room or need to be sought from outside. Our role is to amplify, connect, and support. Our practices continue to evolve as we learn in relationship with partners, communities, and knowledge holders.
Collaboration Partner
Julia Coburn
(She/Her)
Founder and Relational Systems Facilitator
Julia Coburn is a Relational Systems Facilitator who supports communities, organizations, and cross-sector partners in navigating complexity with greater trust, clarity, and humanity. She helps groups slow down, hear one another, see patterns more clearly, and move together in ways that feel grounded, ethical, and aligned with their purpose.
Her approach is relational and adaptive. Through Whole Story, Julia creates spaces where people can speak honestly, pathways that reveal insight and guide adaptive movement, and
practices that strengthen systems thinking, collective learning, and meaningful collaboration.
​​Across her career, Julia has worked in many contexts and at many scales. She co-founded WorldVuze, a global dialogue platform connecting students in over 70 countries, and supported national partnerships with organizations such as UNICEF Canada and Kids Help Phone. She helped steward a national Community of Practice in community-based research, collaborating with community, Indigenous, peer, and academic researchers across Canada. She also co-founded Cross Community Connect in Tanzania, supporting community-led solutions, youth leadership, and local entrepreneurship.
In municipal planning and sustainability, Julia has contributed to nature-based planning, climate resilience, and systems-focused initiatives, supported by her Master’s in Environmental Studies (Planning) from the University of Waterloo. As a researcher with the Centre for Community-Based Research, she co-designed and implemented community-engaged research with people with lived experience, community members, staff, and other partners to inform organizational learning, alignment, and programming.
Today, through Whole Story, Julia brings these threads together, relational facilitation, systems sensing, and collaborative design, to help teams and communities make sense of complexity and move forward with greater trust, insight, and purpose. Her work is grounded in care, humility, and a deep belief that good process can transform not just decisions, but relationships, systems, and futures.​​