Human Works Group brings insight, guidance, practice, and tools to the work of making things better in our world.
Human Works Group exists to bring insight, guidance, practice, and tools to bear where they can do the most good. Insight into what is really going on, guidance for deciding what to do about it, practice that builds the capacity to carry it through, and tools that keep all of it within reach. Each does real work on its own, and each does more alongside the others than any could manage alone.
These are different kinds of work, though, and different kinds of work ask for different identities, rhythms, and ways of earning trust. So Human Works Group is designed to give its member companies the room to be themselves while drawing on a shared purpose and shared foundation underneath. Each organization keeps its own voice and leadership and its own way of working, and what connects them is a common purpose that has always been enough on its own.
Nurturing ideas that can make a difference in the world, creating solutions to address real needs, and supporting existing work that shows promise.
Our work takes four forms: nurturing ideas that can make a difference in the world, creating organizations that meet real needs and supporting work that already shows promise, and stewarding all of it over time so it can grow without drifting from the people it serves. What each of those means, and why we hold to them, is the subject of our philosophy.
We are not trying to grow for its own sake. The question is always whether an organization can reach more people, or offer them something more valuable, without giving up what made it worth trusting. For some member companies, that points toward expanding; for others, toward staying deliberately small.
The Human Works Group itself grows the same way. Some of what we do we build from the start, and some already exists, doing work that shares this purpose and finding a better home here than on its own. We would rather tend a few organizations that genuinely matter, whether we started them or brought them in, than gather many that don't.
Human Works Group was co-founded by David L. Harkins and Jennifer T. Harkins to create a home for the organizations, ideas, and ventures a shared purpose connects.
David is a social scientist and practitioner who has spent his career where organizations, culture, and change meet, working out why good people and teams so often fall short of what they are capable of, and how the right conditions can change that. He started Human Works Group after seeing the same pattern again and again: the difference between a team that thrives and one that stalls usually has less to do with talent than with whether the right help arrives when it is needed.
Jennifer (“JuJu”) is a facilitator and practitioner whose work centers on women in leadership. She draws business operations, leadership development, and somatic practice into one practical approach to personal and organizational change, grounded in a conviction that lasting change in an organization begins with the inner work of the people leading it. She brings both that conviction and the skill to help leaders do it.
David and Jennifer founded Human Works Group, but it is being built deliberately to grow larger than the two of them. The organizations inside it are meant to find their own leadership and their own reasons for existing, and part of how we steward them is preparing each to outlast whoever began it. An organization is healthiest when its purpose does not rest on any single person.
If what you are building shares something with what we are building, we would welcome a conversation. That includes founders and leaders wondering whether their organization might find a better home inside a group like this one, even when the timing is uncertain and there is nothing specific on the table.
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