The Social Wealth Builders Team

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Julia is the co-founder and principal of Social Wealth Builders and the creator of the Social Wealth Inventory. A trained network scholar with more than two decades of published research on collaboration, collaborative governance, and how relationships shape outcomes in complex organizations, she built the SWI to translate research into a tool leaders can actually use — not another academic framework that lives on a shelf.

Her academic career spans some of the country's leading public affairs schools. She has held faculty and leadership positions at Syracuse University's Maxwell School, Indiana University's O'Neill School, and the University of Washington's Evans School, teaching and writing on cross-sector collaboration, networks, and the conditions that make collective action work. Her research has been published in leading peer reviewed journals and she has advised governments, foundations, and nonprofits on how to design for collaboration rather than hope for it.

Alongside her work at SWB, Julia serves as Executive Director of the William D. Ruckelshaus Center — a joint effort of the University of Washington and Washington State University that brings together public, private, nonprofit, and tribal leaders to tackle the most difficult issues in the Pacific Northwest. She is also an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, a recognition reserved for individuals whose contributions have measurably advanced the research and practice of public administration.

The SWI draws directly on the questions that have shaped her entire career: How do people build trust? What makes some teams adaptive and others brittle? Why do some collaborations produce lasting value and others fall apart? She built the tool because she wanted the answers to reach beyond academic audiences — into the hands of leaders making daily decisions about who to trust, who to promote, and how to hold teams together under pressure.

Connect with Julia at julia@socwealthbuilders.com

Darren is the co-founder and principal of Social Wealth Builders where he leads operations, strategy, and delivery. He brings more than two decades of practitioner experience leading teams and building systems in healthcare, academic medicine, and mission-driven organizations — environments where the cost of poor collaboration shows up in patient safety, regulatory exposure, and mission delivery, not just quarterly numbers.

Most recently, as Director of Interprofessional Education and University Simulation at SUNY Upstate Medical University, he built and operated an $11M simulation enterprise from the ground up — scaling it to support thousands of learners annually across Medicine, Nursing, Health Professions, and hospital-based clinical teams.  

Earlier in his career, he led stabilization and turnaround work at Sunquest Information Systems (now Clinisys), reducing a 1,500-case backlog by 75% in a support environment with direct patient-safety implications, and held senior operations roles at Indiana Blood Center and the American Red Cross — where his region was the only one nationally to hit blood collection targets every month for a full fiscal year, then sustain the streak for 19 consecutive months.

Darren also works as an independent consultant to senior leaders navigating change, transition, and operational complexity. That ongoing client work keeps the SWI grounded in what leaders are actually wrestling with - not what looks clean in a framework.

On the SWB side specifically, Darren is the reason engagements run cleanly: he's where insights become outcomes and timelines get kept.

Connect with Darren at darren@socwealthbuilders.com