Where It All Began
The conversation that birthed The Intersect started in a parked car.
I was sitting alone, talking with a close partner on the phone. We were discussing yet another effort aimed at creating large-scale change. On paper, everything looked right. Smart people, strong intentions and a clear commitment to making things better.
And yet, beneath all of it, it was stagnant and lacked momentum or true power to shift conditions. I remember staring through the windshield, frustrated as I kept seeing the same pattern repeat itself. Coalitions formed and partnerships launched initiatives as people rallied around a shared purpose.
Yet too often, the outcome struggled to hold or produce lasting results over time.
- Momentum slowed.
- Relationships strained.
- Leadership changed.
- Funding cycles ended.
- Alignment became a rarity.
And what began as transformational became transactional.
The question that kept surfacing was simple:
Why?
Why were so many well-intentioned efforts struggling to create lasting change?
As the conversation continued, I found myself naming a frustration I had been carrying for years. Many efforts to advance ecosystem change felt disconnected from community and from people.
Organizations were responding to urgent needs by building programs, initiatives, and interventions – band aids at best. However, there was usually no shared framework or tested approach for helping ecosystems align and move together over time. We were building responses … We weren’t always building conditions for change.
That realization stayed with me long after the call ended.
In many ways, it clarified something I had been sensing for years:
The apparatus for ecosystem change itself needed to be designed differently.
Then another epiphany came after I had just stepped away from a client call. Like so many organizations, they were wrestling with an important question: What comes next?
On the surface, it looked like a strategy challenge. But as I reflected on the conversation, something became unmistakably clear.
The greatest barrier to change wasn’t external, it was internal.
I remember thinking, “All the strategy in the world will fall apart if leadership is misaligned, if decision-making is unclear, accountability is absent or if internal structures are weak or produce the same inequities.”
A pattern that had been emerging snapped into focus … Durable change requires attending to two realities at once.
The first is the internal architecture of organizations: leadership, governance, decision-making, accountability, alignment, and institutional health. The second is the broader ecosystem: the partnerships, systems, relationships, strategy, frameworks, and external conditions necessary to move collective work forward.
Most organizations focused on one or the other, very few worked intentionally at the seam between them.
Yet that seam was where some of the most important work lived. It was where organizational health met ecosystem strategy and where institutions moved beyond intention and into implementation.
Change Is Networked
Some of my earliest conversations around what would eventually become The Intersect were with other futurists who shared a common belief: the future is networked.
That idea has shaped how I understand change and how it moves.
I often think about it like a forest.
When we walk through a forest, we see individual trees. We notice their size, their shape, their proximity to one another. From above ground, they appear separate. But underground, an entirely different story is unfolding.
Trees are connected through intricate root systems. They share nutrients, communicate distress, adapt together and ultimately depend on one another in ways we rarely see. The health of the forest itself is not determined by any single tree … It is shaped by the mutual relationships between them.
Change works much the same way. Yet so much of our work across institutions, sectors, and systems has historically been designed as though organizations and change efforts operate independently from one another.
When we look back at the movements and transformations that have created meaningful shifts in communities and systems, we see that significant change emerges when relationships become aligned and operate as shared infrastructure.
And the more I observed ecosystems, partnerships, collaboratives, and coalitions, the more I realized how few spaces existed to support that kind of work intentionally.
There were organizations focused on leadership, strategy and implementation.
But it was rare to find firms and practices designed to help people build the connective tissue between those imperatives.
That was a strong signal that it was time to design something new: a practice rooted in the belief that durable change requires attention to both institutions and the ecosystems in which they operate.
Building Back Differently
The earliest days of The Intersect felt complicated and even experimental.
It was May and June of 2021. Communities were emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines were becoming more widely available, people were gathering again. After months of isolation, there was a renewed sense of movement and connection.
But the pandemic had exposed what many of us already knew: the fragility of our institutions, our workplaces, our health systems, and many of the structures we rely on every day. COVID didn’t create those vulnerabilities… It revealed the cracks that could no longer be ignored.
It had also been one year since the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.
Across the country, institutions were publicly committing to equity-centered work and impacts. Philanthropic dollars were moving quickly to support those efforts while organizations were engaging in learning, reflection, and attempts to confront structural inequity in new ways. Reform was in the air.
Some of it felt meaningful and well intentioned. Yet much of it also felt fragile, performative, and disconnected from the deeper conditions required to create lasting change. Time would demonstrate that many of these efforts would be pulled back, masked, or retrenched in the years to come.
This time was also one of the most innovative periods I had witnessed in my career.
Mutual aid networks emerged almost overnight, health systems adapted, institutions and entire ecosystems demonstrated an ability to move faster and with more conviction than many believed possible.
In many ways, the moment was reminiscent of the period following the 2008 recession. That too was a time of experimentation, innovation, and new approaches to persistent challenges.
But what endured? What was healed? What was changed? What became embedded into how systems actually operate?
In 2021, much of the national conversation was centered around the phrase “Build Back Better.” But even then, that language and sentiment felt incomplete. Building back better often implied improving what already existed.
What I found myself asking instead was, “what would it mean to build back differently?”
Building differently required something deeper than reform. It required examining the structural conditions beneath the visible problems and asking whether our institutions, policies, relationships, and ecosystems were actually designed to create justice, dignity, safety, and long-term security.
Band-aids and surface-level reforms would never be enough. The challenges we were facing were structural, so the response needed to be too.
That conviction became part of the foundation of The Intersect.
What Became Clear
Five years in, The Intersect’s understanding of systems work has become both more complex and much clearer.
What can be appreciated more deeply now is how much history, power, incentives, institutions, and relationships shape systems. Systems work is political, structural, strategic, and deeply human.
The Intersect has also come to appreciate that meaningful change requires far more than strategy alone. Without trust, aligned leadership, governance, accountability, and the capacity to move together, even strong strategies struggle to take hold.
The need for partners who can work at the intersection of organizational alignment, systems change, ecosystem design, and implementation feels more urgent today than it did five years ago.
Across our work, we continue to see familiar patterns: institutions applying technical fixes to adaptive challenges, ecosystems seeking collaboration without the structures to sustain it, and organizations pursuing shared goals while navigating fragmented power, misalignment, and competing incentives.
However, when people have space to think differently together and the conditions for collaboration are intentionally designed, change can move faster, deeper, and with greater staying power.
The Work Ahead
Five years is a meaningful milestone.
The work has grown in scale, complexity, and reach, yet it remains rooted in the same belief that shaped The Intersect from the beginning: the way we design processes, relationships, and systems shapes what becomes possible.
We have become increasingly clear that our work is not simply helping organizations develop plans or supporting ecosystems to hone strategy. It involves designing the conditions that allow people, institutions, and ecosystems to think differently, work differently, and build differently together.
What continues to commit us to this work is the opportunity to partner with leaders, institutions, and communities that are asking difficult questions under increasingly complex conditions. Despite the challenges, we continue to see what becomes possible when people build shared understanding, design and align around a vision, and move with intention.
Institutions today are navigating economic uncertainty, political transition, social fragmentation, shifting public expectations, and growing pressure to respond to challenges that no single organization can solve alone.
Many systems are still operating in response mode and not enough are asking:
- Are we structurally prepared for what is coming?
- What assumptions are we still operating from that no longer match reality?
- Where are our systems brittle?
- What would it mean to build for the next decade or two decades, rather than the next immediate cycle?
These are the kinds of questions that will shape the future.
The Intersect has become a place people turn to when they know something important must shift, but the path forward is not yet fully visible. We have the privilege of helping shape that path alongside them.
Today, the work remains what it has always been: helping build the connective tissue, alignment, and conditions necessary for more equitable, resilient, and durable futures.
And we believe that work is more necessary than ever.
In partnership,
Melissa Young
Co-Managing Partner Ecosystem Strategy and External Positioning