Heather Johnson is Co-Director of NewStories, a nonprofit that works alongside communities, organizations, and leaders navigating disruption and profound transition—strengthening the relationships, learning, and collaborative capacity needed for regenerative futures to emerge. A leadership and health coach who supports meaningful change in times of transition, Heather brings an integrated approach connecting adult development, leadership, and whole-person health to help people meet change with clarity, resilience, and alignment.
Over the past twenty-five years, Heather has built and stewarded organizations focused on human and societal well-being, including twelve years in senior leadership at The Whidbey Institute. Her work consistently places her alongside leaders and communities navigating complexity—moments when the path forward is unclear but the stakes are deeply felt. Through her coaching practice, Fractally Whole, she helps people live and lead in ways that are grounded, sustainable, and responsive to real conditions, guided by a personal realization that when we push for impact without tending to our own well-being, we undermine what we hope to create.
Heather helps teams and organizations work in more self-organizing ways, supporting groups to clarify roles and responsibilities, distribute decision-making, and strengthen communication while building the trust needed to operate without traditional top-down management. Her approach ensures teams stay accountable and aligned around shared purpose while developing the flexibility to respond to emergence rather than rigid plans. At NewStories, she brings this same approach to collective work, supporting regenerative ways of organizing and responding in a rapidly changing world by strengthening the capacities that help people, communities, and systems move toward what is emerging.
Heather’s work embodies the understanding that transformation requires tending to the whole—individual well-being and collective capacity, personal development and systemic change, clarity of purpose and openness to what cannot yet be seen. By helping people and organizations build the internal conditions for resilience before crisis demands it, she demonstrates that sustainable change comes not from pushing harder but from creating the relational and organizational infrastructure that allows life-affirming futures to emerge.
