About Rootwork
Rootwork Collaborative is led by Julie Finelli, who brings experience in mission-driven and nonprofit operations across the arts, healthcare, and education. With a background in people management and organizational strategy, Julie helps teams embody their values from the inside out.
Rootwork focuses on the connective tissue of organizations - the policies, processes, and practices that shape how teams actually work together. This work lives in the often-invisible space between intention and execution, where culture either takes root or quietly erodes.
We believe organizations are living systems. They carry memory, rhythm, tension, and potential. When they outgrow their internal structures, the misalignment shows up everywhere: in burnout, in decision paralysis, in values that sound right but don’t feel right in practice. Rootwork exists to help organizations come back into coherence with themselves.
Through deep listening, honest reflection, and collaborative design, I help teams build structures that adapt, repair, and keep learning — so growth doesn’t come at the cost of integrity, humanity, or purpose.
Rootwork helps organizations in transition design systems that hold their values, support their people, and evolve with integrity.
Windows into Rootwork Theory
We work with the whole system: people, processes, policies, tools, and the less-visible data like emotion, energy, and embodied experience.
Insight doesn’t only come from metrics — it comes from paying attention to what the organization is telling us through behavior, friction, and flow. This work is collaborative by nature. Input matters. Context matters. No one-size solutions.
Holistic & Co-Creative by Design
Global &
Cross-Cultural Lens
This work is informed by international and cross-cultural experience, living and working abroad, and formal study in international communications. I approach organizations with an anthropologist’s curiosity - paying attention to context, language, power, and worldview. This lens helps me see how culture quietly shapes behavior, decision-making, and conflict, especially across differences.
AnTI-Status Quo
(with CARE)
I’m not interested in doing things “the way they’ve always been done” if they no longer serve the people doing the work. My approach is calmly provocative - rooted in experimentation, learning, and iteration. Progress comes from trying, reflecting, repairing, and trying again.
LIVED EXPERIENCE ACROSS SECTORS
My perspective is shaped by work in education, arts and culture, healthcare and wellness, and both entrepreneurial and institutional environments. That range allows me to bridge structure and creativity, rigor and nuance — and to help organizations translate between worlds that don’t always speak the same language.
