Collaborate
Cultivating Spaces, Pathways, and Practices for Working Better Together.
You are working to solve challenges that matter: climate change, community wellbeing, land use, housing, youth futures, care systems. Your teams have experience and plans, and yet you know that lasting solutions require something deeper: the ability to listen across differences, build trust, and hold relationships that expand what becomes possible. Whole Story partners with organizations and networks who are ready to listen deeply, move with integrity, and transform how they work. We work with you to create spaces of trust where people can be heard, pathways of insight and implementation that guide adaptive movement, and practices to develop systems thinking, adaptive learning, and the ability to collaborate in complexity.
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We partner with organizations and networks who are working in environments where:
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The work is genuinely complex, emotional, or multi-stakeholder, and people are looking for approaches that support deeper connection, clarity, and collaboration.
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Trust, communication, and alignment matter deeply, and teams want to strengthen them across departments, sectors, and communities.
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Multiple ways of knowing need to be woven together, including community knowledge, lived experience, scientific evidence, professional expertise, and cultural perspectives.
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Past experiences and community relationships require care, and teams are committed to moving forward in ways that acknowledge history and build long-term trust.
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Different priorities, mandates, or timelines must co-exist, and people want support navigating these tensions without losing shared purpose.
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Urgency and pressure are part of the context, yet teams want to make thoughtful, ethical, and relational decisions, not reactive ones.
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Learning, reflection, and adaptive action are seen as essential to working well in complexity.
We most often work with municipalities, social service organizations, post-secondary institutions, public libraries, health and environmental networks, and cross-sector coalitions — teams who care about people and outcomes, and who want to move through complexity in a more relational way.
Spaces:
Facilitation and Connection
Where honest conversation becomes possible.
We design and facilitate multi interest-holder engagements, participatory research processes, and community-rooted dialogues that help people hear each other across differences. Designed with safety, dignity, and relational care, these spaces support teams and partners in building trust, repairing fragmentation, surfacing a diversity of knowledge, and moving from conversation to collaborative action.
For example:
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Engagement processes that bring community, practitioners, and institutional leaders into dialogue
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Workshops that bridge perspectives across departments, disciplines, or generations
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Community conversations about high-emotion topics such as land use, climate, or housing
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​Participatory research and values-mapping processes that surface diverse knowledge, priorities, and tensions
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Roundtables that convene cross-sector partners to explore emerging issues or collective responsibility
Pathways:
Insights & Strategic Design
How groups make sense of complexity and move forward together.
Dialogue alone is not enough. Pathways help groups translate insight into movement. They are living agreements about how work gets done: ethically, relationally, and in ways groups can sustain. Rather than writing strategies on your behalf, Whole Story helps you build the collaborative infrastructure that makes strategy implementable: shared meaning, relational accountability, distributed leadership, and the ability to adapt as conditions change.
For example:
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Co-created action plans grounded in shared responsibility rather than compliance
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​Prototype partnerships agreements or interdepartmental working models to reduce friction and build relational trust
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Cross-sector implementation pathways for climate adaptation, planning, or community wellbeing
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Monitoring and evaluation systems that function as adaptive learning loops instead of compliance reporting
Practices:
Culture of Collaboration
What sustains change over time.
Complex challenges require new dispositions, literacies, and cultural practices. Practices help organizations embed collaboration, adaptive learning, and systems-based thinking into everyday work. Whole Story designs professional learning and training experiences that strengthen the underlying capacities communities and institutions need to sit with complexity, navigate uncertainty, and act responsibly together.
For example:
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Systems thinking and non-linear adaptive planning
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Relational facilitation and process design grounded in care and respect
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Reflective process and collective learning
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Approaches that respect and invite multiple ways of knowing