Dispatch 1 focussed on Essence — the irreducible thing underneath the biography, the quality that makes you lead the way you do. Dispatch 2 moved outward to Elements — how Essence shows up, and what to do with the parts that no longer serve you. Both were primarily internal work. Looking inward, mapping what is there.
This month the work changed direction. It moved outward.
Bottom of Form
Each month between the group calls, the expedition assigns a paired reflection conversation — two Explorers, one set of questions, no agenda. This month I was paired with Salma. The question we were given: which Elements need combining in your leading as a philanthropist, and which pairs are the hardest to hold?
Julia is clear that the word is combine, not balance. Balance implies trade-offs — two things in competition, one gaining at the expense of the other. Combine means both at once, on a sliding scale, constantly reassessing. The tension between apparently opposed Elements is not a problem to resolve. It is, she argues, where the energy of leading lives.
Salma and I talked for an hour. Three pairs surfaced between us: drive and patience, giving and boundaries, urgency and uncertainty.
Drive and patience: the Pulse
In the first dispatch I wrote about the Drini i Zi — the river where I grew up in northern Albania that runs fast, does not stop for obstacles, keeps moving. It is part of my Essence. In most contexts it is an asset: fast learning, adaptability, the energy to get things done. In volunteering, I have discovered its limits.
In one of my volunteering roles I sit as an Advisor. Most of what I contribute is strategic — direction, challenge, occasional design work. The organisation runs on goodwill and organic energy. That is not a weakness; it is the point. The way the community functions, the way people stay engaged, depends on the ethos being felt in how things are done, not just in what is decided.
When I proposed a quarterly volunteer newsletter — the Pulse — I found myself taking on its production. I had the idea, I built the template, and I quickly understood that I could not delegate collection of the content without it disappearing back into the group chat it was designed to replace. So I stayed with it.
The Pulse exists to increase engagement among volunteers — to show what the community is building together, to give people a sense of belonging to something larger than their own contribution. That matters. It is why I proposed it. But producing it required input from the other leads, and the leads are volunteers too. They are balancing this against jobs, families, the full weight of their lives. A newsletter deadline sits below most of what they carry.
The river wanted to move fast, introduce structure, create clarity, get it done. The template helped — it gave people a clear shape to work with, replaced the chaos of open-ended requests. But it could not make people fill it. Nudges were needed. Then more nudges. The frustration was real. What I kept coming back to, when the patience ran thin, was purpose — what this was for — and context — who these people were and what they were already carrying. Those two things held me in the waiting better than the river could.
The Pulse was completed. Published. The feedback was warm.
The combine: the drive found its expression in the design and the structure. The patience held space for people to come at their own pace. The structure served the ethos rather than overriding it. Both were necessary, in different measure, at different moments.
Giving with boundaries: the refugee
Part of my giving as I wrote in my post Opening Doors is direct and personal — helping individual women in survival moments. Abusive relationships. Displacement. Crisis. I have a personal policy: I give to people and causes I know well, and I do not support anything that is not compliant with the law. Salma put it well in our conversation: a boundary is not withdrawal. It is how you define where your giving can be most honest — and it preserves what you have to offer. Without it, the giving becomes something you do by reflex rather than by choice.
A woman I was supporting — a refugee with a young son — had not told the authorities the full story of her situation. She told me honestly. Her ex-partner, a gambling addict, remained in her life because of the child they shared. She had chosen not to disclose this to the authorities, navigating a system she did not fully trust, doing what survival required for herself and her son.
I did not agree with misleading the authorities. I also understood why she had done it. These two things sat alongside each other and did not resolve. I stayed — until I had made sure that she and her son were safe. Then I distanced myself. My policy held: I cannot support what sits outside the law, even when I understand the reason for it.
Salma described her equivalent. She was asked to help someone’s son who had lost his driving licence due to traffic violations. Her personal policy was the same: she does not support when someone has violated the law. She held it. The structure was the same: a boundary that exists not to protect yourself from difficulty, but to define where the giving remains honest.
The combine here is giving and boundaries — and what makes it hard is that the boundary does not arrive at a neutral moment. It arrives when someone needs help. Holding it then is not comfortable. But without it, the giving loses its ground.
Urgency and uncertainty: Gaza
Not every giving decision comes with a personal relationship to anchor it. Sometimes the urgency is clear and the verification is not.
I donated to an organisation focused on feeding children and women in Gaza during the bombardments. I read their newsletter and posts carefully. I looked for signs of seriousness, of the funds reaching the people they were intended for. I could not be certain. The need was not in question. Whether my specific contribution would find its way to the right place was.
I gave anyway. The phrase I come back to in moments like that: throw the help to the universe and it will find itself to the right people. It is not a policy. It is what you hold onto when the policy runs out and the urgency is real and the uncertainty is the condition you are working inside, not a problem that will be solved before you have to decide.
Salma and I talked about this pair too. In giving work you are always searching for answers and for impact. But measuring impact takes time. Some things you have to be comfortable not knowing. We feel threatened by uncertainty, particularly in leadership contexts where knowing is what is expected of you. The willingness to act well with partial information, and trust that it was worth doing — that may be one of the things that makes giving sustainable over time.
The combine: acting with urgency while holding the uncertainty. Not resolving it. Living inside it.
What transfers?
What Salma and I agreed is that Julia’s combining is not a formula. It does not produce a clean answer. The Pulse worked, but the waiting was hard and the process was imperfect. The refugee needed help and my policy eventually drew a line. The Gaza donation may have reached people who needed it. It may not have.
Salma’s word for what holds all of this together is AND. Not black OR white. Not drive OR patience. Not giving OR boundaries. Not urgency OR certainty. Both, simultaneously, responding to context. The sliding scale constantly reassessed.
What I am learning is that the work is not to make the AND disappear. It is to keep it visible, and to lead from inside it.
Two questions for readers:
In your giving, where do you find the AND hardest to hold — and what does it cost you when you collapse it into either/or?
When you act without knowing the outcome, what do you trust — and has that trust ever been tested?
About the Author:
Anila DeHart is an Advisor, Researcher, and Executive Educator on education-workforce coordination and future-of-work. She examines coordination mechanisms that enable sustainable education-workforce partnerships and equitable pathways from learning to meaningful work. Current collaborations include Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) on university-employer partnership infrastructure and the University of Oxford’s AI in Education (AIEOU) 2026 Shared Research Agenda on Future of Education, Work and Institutions.
With twenty years at Deloitte, most recently as Global Managing Director leading talent strategy and workforce transformations for 500,000+ professionals globally, Anila brings deep expertise in future-ready skills systems and organisational change at scale. Her career began in higher education, teaching at universities in Central Europe and as a Fulbright scholar in US, and leading organisational development and strategic recruitment at the University of Arizona.
Anila serves as Executive Coach and Leadership Facilitator at Headspring Executive (Financial Times-IE Business School joint venture). She regularly briefs industry forums on transformation and skills development, and advocates for societal equity through initiatives supporting career advancement for youth and underprivileged groups.
Two dispatches in, and I am noticing a pattern in how the Women Emerging expedition for philanthropists is structured.
Dispatch 1 focussed on Essence — the irreducible thing underneath the biography, the quality that makes you lead the way you do. Dispatch 2 moved outward to Elements — how Essence shows up, and what to do with the parts that no longer serve you. Both were primarily internal work. Looking inward, mapping what is there.
This month the work changed direction. It moved outward.
Bottom of Form
Each month between the group calls, the expedition assigns a paired reflection conversation — two Explorers, one set of questions, no agenda. This month I was paired with Salma. The question we were given: which Elements need combining in your leading as a philanthropist, and which pairs are the hardest to hold?
Julia is clear that the word is combine, not balance. Balance implies trade-offs — two things in competition, one gaining at the expense of the other. Combine means both at once, on a sliding scale, constantly reassessing. The tension between apparently opposed Elements is not a problem to resolve. It is, she argues, where the energy of leading lives.
Salma and I talked for an hour. Three pairs surfaced between us: drive and patience, giving and boundaries, urgency and uncertainty.
Drive and patience: the Pulse
In the first dispatch I wrote about the Drini i Zi — the river where I grew up in northern Albania that runs fast, does not stop for obstacles, keeps moving. It is part of my Essence. In most contexts it is an asset: fast learning, adaptability, the energy to get things done. In volunteering, I have discovered its limits.
In one of my volunteering roles I sit as an Advisor. Most of what I contribute is strategic — direction, challenge, occasional design work. The organisation runs on goodwill and organic energy. That is not a weakness; it is the point. The way the community functions, the way people stay engaged, depends on the ethos being felt in how things are done, not just in what is decided.
When I proposed a quarterly volunteer newsletter — the Pulse — I found myself taking on its production. I had the idea, I built the template, and I quickly understood that I could not delegate collection of the content without it disappearing back into the group chat it was designed to replace. So I stayed with it.
The Pulse exists to increase engagement among volunteers — to show what the community is building together, to give people a sense of belonging to something larger than their own contribution. That matters. It is why I proposed it. But producing it required input from the other leads, and the leads are volunteers too. They are balancing this against jobs, families, the full weight of their lives. A newsletter deadline sits below most of what they carry.
The river wanted to move fast, introduce structure, create clarity, get it done. The template helped — it gave people a clear shape to work with, replaced the chaos of open-ended requests. But it could not make people fill it. Nudges were needed. Then more nudges. The frustration was real. What I kept coming back to, when the patience ran thin, was purpose — what this was for — and context — who these people were and what they were already carrying. Those two things held me in the waiting better than the river could.
The Pulse was completed. Published. The feedback was warm.
The combine: the drive found its expression in the design and the structure. The patience held space for people to come at their own pace. The structure served the ethos rather than overriding it. Both were necessary, in different measure, at different moments.
Giving with boundaries: the refugee
Part of my giving as I wrote in my post Opening Doors is direct and personal — helping individual women in survival moments. Abusive relationships. Displacement. Crisis. I have a personal policy: I give to people and causes I know well, and I do not support anything that is not compliant with the law. Salma put it well in our conversation: a boundary is not withdrawal. It is how you define where your giving can be most honest — and it preserves what you have to offer. Without it, the giving becomes something you do by reflex rather than by choice.
A woman I was supporting — a refugee with a young son — had not told the authorities the full story of her situation. She told me honestly. Her ex-partner, a gambling addict, remained in her life because of the child they shared. She had chosen not to disclose this to the authorities, navigating a system she did not fully trust, doing what survival required for herself and her son.
I did not agree with misleading the authorities. I also understood why she had done it. These two things sat alongside each other and did not resolve. I stayed — until I had made sure that she and her son were safe. Then I distanced myself. My policy held: I cannot support what sits outside the law, even when I understand the reason for it.
Salma described her equivalent. She was asked to help someone’s son who had lost his driving licence due to traffic violations. Her personal policy was the same: she does not support when someone has violated the law. She held it. The structure was the same: a boundary that exists not to protect yourself from difficulty, but to define where the giving remains honest.
The combine here is giving and boundaries — and what makes it hard is that the boundary does not arrive at a neutral moment. It arrives when someone needs help. Holding it then is not comfortable. But without it, the giving loses its ground.
Urgency and uncertainty: Gaza
Not every giving decision comes with a personal relationship to anchor it. Sometimes the urgency is clear and the verification is not.
I donated to an organisation focused on feeding children and women in Gaza during the bombardments. I read their newsletter and posts carefully. I looked for signs of seriousness, of the funds reaching the people they were intended for. I could not be certain. The need was not in question. Whether my specific contribution would find its way to the right place was.
I gave anyway. The phrase I come back to in moments like that: throw the help to the universe and it will find itself to the right people. It is not a policy. It is what you hold onto when the policy runs out and the urgency is real and the uncertainty is the condition you are working inside, not a problem that will be solved before you have to decide.
Salma and I talked about this pair too. In giving work you are always searching for answers and for impact. But measuring impact takes time. Some things you have to be comfortable not knowing. We feel threatened by uncertainty, particularly in leadership contexts where knowing is what is expected of you. The willingness to act well with partial information, and trust that it was worth doing — that may be one of the things that makes giving sustainable over time.
The combine: acting with urgency while holding the uncertainty. Not resolving it. Living inside it.
What transfers?
What Salma and I agreed is that Julia’s combining is not a formula. It does not produce a clean answer. The Pulse worked, but the waiting was hard and the process was imperfect. The refugee needed help and my policy eventually drew a line. The Gaza donation may have reached people who needed it. It may not have.
Salma’s word for what holds all of this together is AND. Not black OR white. Not drive OR patience. Not giving OR boundaries. Not urgency OR certainty. Both, simultaneously, responding to context. The sliding scale constantly reassessed.
What I am learning is that the work is not to make the AND disappear. It is to keep it visible, and to lead from inside it.
Two questions for readers:
In your giving, where do you find the AND hardest to hold — and what does it cost you when you collapse it into either/or?
When you act without knowing the outcome, what do you trust — and has that trust ever been tested?
About the Author:
Anila DeHart is an Advisor, Researcher, and Executive Educator on education-workforce coordination and future-of-work. She examines coordination mechanisms that enable sustainable education-workforce partnerships and equitable pathways from learning to meaningful work. Current collaborations include Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) on university-employer partnership infrastructure and the University of Oxford’s AI in Education (AIEOU) 2026 Shared Research Agenda on Future of Education, Work and Institutions.
With twenty years at Deloitte, most recently as Global Managing Director leading talent strategy and workforce transformations for 500,000+ professionals globally, Anila brings deep expertise in future-ready skills systems and organisational change at scale. Her career began in higher education, teaching at universities in Central Europe and as a Fulbright scholar in US, and leading organisational development and strategic recruitment at the University of Arizona.
Anila serves as Executive Coach and Leadership Facilitator at Headspring Executive (Financial Times-IE Business School joint venture). She regularly briefs industry forums on transformation and skills development, and advocates for societal equity through initiatives supporting career advancement for youth and underprivileged groups.
