Nice to meet you.
Hi, I’m Daniela.
Educator. Coach. Author. But most importantly, mother of two lovely and lively young boys and wife to an equally lovely man who also does work he cares about.
(He does impact sourcing, so he is your man if you need regenerative organic shea butter or something like that!) I come from a mother who was a teacher and taught me the value of education and a father, from Italy, who taught me that one should always enjoy their work.
My nuclear family and I currently live in a co-housing community in Boulder, Colorado. We find that life is more full, in all the ways, when we embrace our interdependance.
I teach at the intersection of systems and social innovation, helping people understand problems before they try to “solve” them. I sometimes do that in universities and have been a Lecturer at Oxford, Yale, Watson, and University of Colorado (and dozens of global institutions for shorter one-off lectures) and served as the Deputy Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship when I was at Oxford’s Saïd Business School. I sometimes teach this systems work in companies, foundations, or non-profits, helping them consider how they might think about the systems they care about or how they might influence change outside the bounds of their own organizations. I often work with educators or teams of facilitators who want to learn more about how to bring systems perspectives into their work.
I designed some tools and frameworks that are used in social innovation and systems education programs globally like the Impact Gaps Canvas and Map the System, which now runs at 50+ institutions around the world. In addition to lots of articles, I wrote a report that was influential in social entrepreneurship education called Tackling Heropreneurship (here’s the short summary), co-authored a book on rethinking volunteer travel (Learning Service) and co-authored a book that is a systems learning toolkit (The 55 Minutes).
I have a 1:1 and group coaching practice and use a tool called Re-Mind with some of my clients that is incredible at helping people get unstuck from the triggers of past trauma and intense persistent emotions.
My learning has been shaped by MANY great people including the late Mickey Sampson in Cambodia who exemplified values-based leadership to me and the late Pamela Hartigan who helped me learn all things social entrepreneurship (and how to sometimes choose to ask for forgiveness, not permission, when you want to create new things in the world). So many of my other living teachers are the ones making offers in the Unstuck Club, for which I am so grateful. My leadership has been greatly shaped by the Clore Social Leadership Programme, the Waters Center for Systems Thinking’s Advanced Facilitator Credential (AFC) Program, Strozzi Institute’s coaching course, and Wolf Willow’s life-changing Positive Deviant program, without which I would not be the same human I am today. I’m also a product of my monthly mom’s Random Acts of Kindness circle, our Sacred Feminine Portal circle, a new weekly meditation gathering I’m helping to host in Boulder, global friendships with people passionate about contributing to shifting the systems they care about, and so many other influential relationships and groups in my life. I’m lucky and so grateful.
It’s great to meet you. May any interactions we have or work we do together be for the hightest and greatest good of all concerned.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Want to know more about my offers?
Want to learn more about my thoughts on systems?
Here is one of my key points: you can’t “solve” a system, and you can’t “solve” a symptom.
Yet we all try to do that alllllll the time. The problems we care about in the world are the results of complex systems that are perfectly designed to get those results: poverty, environmental harm, mental health struggles. Working to “solve” those things is like putting a bandaid on a wound with the knife still in it. They can’t be “solved” by working on them directly as if they were a lost set of keys or a broken phone. Focusing on test results does not get us overall healthier education system results in the same way that focusing on carbon does not get us a healthier planet.
That said, those results we don’t like that drove us to this work can be changed, by learning how to understand systems and then focusing our energy and money on contributing to shifting the systems that are creating those results.
“Fixing” vs “contributing to shifting.” Totally different approaches that require totally different mindsets.
We need humbleness (the realization that we can’t do it all alone) and systems perspectives (to figure out how the unique gifts you came into the world with can contribute to the work of others). In this feminine, sacred way, we are no longer fueling a competitive heropreneur model of change. Instead, we are using the circular nature of systems and feminine leadership to contribute our gifts to help all boats rise, together.
We can no longer pretend that the linear work of mapping systems and designing impact strategy can be detached from the circular work of understanding ourselves, our energy, our intuition, and each other.
In these complex times, we need leaders who can understand and lead in complexity. This requires a balance of the linear and circular, the inner and the outer.
We can’t change the systems external to us without being in touch with our internal systems. When we act from our inner wounding, we create the same distortions in the external world as those in our internal world.
As Laura Calderon de la Barca, Katherine Milligan & John Kania pointed out in their article on “Healing Systems” there is no such thing as “trauma in the system” unless there is trauma in the individuals in the system. We can’t work on one without working on the other.
We live in a world that has been built on dominance, speed, and winner-takes-all mentality. We have created a plethora of complex global challenges. Now we are trying to “fix” those challenges with that same dominance, speed, and competition, and it’s not working. This world, and each of us, needs balance: of the outer work and the inner work, the doing and the being.
I’m working to get back into balance, and have created communities where we get to do that work, together. Join us!