Julie Wormser didn’t always see herself as a change maker.

In her younger years, Julie’s father, a Holocaust survivor, would ask her, “how will you change the world, singlehandedly?” It wasn’t until her mid-20s that she realized the folly and burden of this question. “Nobody does anything singlehandedly.”

Since then, Julie has realized her passion for facilitating change. She recently took the position of Deputy Director for the Mystic River Watershed Association (MyRWA).

Julie Wormser recently became Deputy Director for MyRWA, where she’s spearheading a groundbreaking effort to organize coastal resilience at the watershed level.

With MyRWA, Julie is facilitating a groundbreaking effort to organize coastal resilience at the watershed scale. She is focusing on building the Resilient Mystic Collaborative, which spearheads climate resilience efforts throughout the watershed. In trying to coordinate the Mystic River Watershed’s 21 municipalities, 500,000 residents, and countless stakeholders, Julie is ambitious. But Julie’s strength lies in communicating climate science and motivating community action. In her words, “there’s a problem and we can do something about it—and, we can be more beautiful at the end.”

Julie is no stranger to being at the forefront of making positive environmental change. She has a history of successful coalition leading and people organizing. For 20 years, she was a senior strategist in multiple regional and national conservation and fisheries policy campaigns with the Environmental Defense Fund, The Wilderness Society, and the Appalachian Mountain Club. But by 2010, bipartisan environmental policy-making at the national level had become almost impossible, as Congress increasingly butted heads along party lines.

That’s when Julie shifted her focus more locally: she became the executive director of The Boston Harbor Association (TBHA). She spent the next 5 years ringing alarm bells in Boston about flooding and the risks of climate change. In 2014 she devised and co-led the Boston Living with Water international design competition, in which more than 250 people from 7 countries submitted resilient design proposals for Boston. Julie got the City of Boston and the Boston Society of Architects on board, which both cosponsored the competition with TBHA.

The competition fueled the city’s focus on climate change. “It infused both city officials and the design community with this idea of this can be beautiful, and we actually have to think about this, this is a real challenge,” Julie explains proudly. It was largely due to Julie’s efforts and community organizing strategies that the City of Boston began to take climate change seriously.

Accessible Waterfront, Vibrant Resilient Community: one visualization in a winning entry from the Boston Living with Water international design challenge. Becoming more resilient also means making our waterfront more beautiful and accessible. Courtesy Daniel Bernstein, Ellen Watts, Nikul Patel, Caitlin Gilman, Pete Hanley, Jaime McGavin, Matt Calvey.

Now that this communication campaign in Boston has paid off, engineers and contractors are picking up where activists like Julie have already done their job. Julie moved on to work with MyRWA, covering new grounds outside city limits. “So what I’m doing in the Mystic River is really the same process we did in the City of Boston,” she explains. There is one big difference: while Boston is tackling resilience on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis, MyRWA wants to make change on the watershed scale.

Working at the watershed scale is inherently difficult. Numerous municipalities must make changes with the hydrology, ecology, and chemistry of the entire river system in mind. The Mystic River Watershed spans 76 square miles, starting with the Aberjona River in Reading which feeds into two lakes, Upper Mystic and Lower Mystic, which then drain to Boston Harbor via the Mystic River.

Map of the Mystic River Watershed. Image courtesy of MyRWA

Land use in each of the 21 municipalities along the watershed has major impacts on its hydrology and ecology. Environmental problems in the Mystic are inherently directional, pushing damage done upstream onto communities downstream. Gathering system-level knowledge about the watershed is hard enough, let alone getting communities to work together.

Creating coastal resilience through watershed management may seem far-fetched, but with Julie facilitating the movement, it seems possible. She’s a self-identified extrovert, down to earth, and relatable. Her expertise is organizing and motivating groups of people. While it’s clear she is proud of her central role in Boston’s journey towards resilience, she sees herself more as a facilitator than an iconic leader. “It’s how we lay the groundwork for people to be creative. And for people to discover ideas on their own,” Julie says. She brings this mindset to every aspect of her work.

Julie explains that making change at the watershed level makes conceptual and even practical sense for the communities along the Mystic River. For example, flooding in Medford has its origins in upstream communities. Conversely, flood damage downstream to resources like Logan Airport could have impacts that reverberate regionally.

With Julie’s leadership, MyRWA reached out to nearly 50 stakeholders throughout the watershed about interest in regional collaboration. Turns out, there’s a lot of interest. It just needs to be coordinated. Municipalities continually expressed that they can’t manage coastal and riverine flooding on their own. Flooding doesn’t stop at municipal boundaries, nor do floodwaters always originate in the places hit hardest. Without strong county governance in New England, MyRWA is filling an essential gap by organizing multiple municipalities around the Mystic River Watershed.

Julie throws out a number of possibilities for regional collaboration. Managing the amount of water that enters the watershed is the central goal. Every municipality could decrease impermeable surfaces like pavement and concrete by 20 percent, for example. Or, downstream communities could pay upstream communities to build parks where they might make more of an impact and reduce runoff.

Right now, Julie’s top priority is building coalitions and relationships. She’s starting with the Resilient Mystic Collaborative, a group of stakeholders from 10 of the 21 municipalities most interested in making change and getting prepared. The collaborative seeks to better understand regional challenges throughout the watershed, and just what exactly is at risk.

By carrying out a regional assessment, they’re beginning to understand the large-scale implications of managing the watershed in the face of climate change. Julie effortlessly reels off what’s in harms way: Logan Airport, two subway lines, major road networks, 100 large fuel tanks, Deer Isle wastewater treatment plant, the Mass General Hospital’s business center, and one of the largest privately owned fruit and vegetable distributors in the nation. In a nutshell, “energy, transportation, and food security are all at risk,” Julie explains.

It’s not just regional resources at risk. Half a million people live along the Mystic Watershed. They are diverse in every way. From Nobel prize winners to recent immigrants, the Mystic is home to a huge range of socioeconomic levels, people with different backgrounds, and privilege. That will make equity and climate justice a central piece of the climate resilience puzzle. “In doing this climate collaborative, we’re really trying to share resources across the income spectrum,” Julie says.

Recently, the climate collaborative held a meeting to pin down its values. They found wealthier communities want to help communities with fewer resources. “We’re not just looking at resilience of buildings, but resilience of people and communities,” says Julie. “That’s exciting.” The collaborative hopes to support an environmental justice peer group that brings best practices to the entire watershed.

Julie is organizing people who will take the lead, communicate risks, and infuse the watershed’s communities with motivation and passion. Working at the watershed level, she’s taking on an ambitious project, because watersheds inherently distribute impacts of environmental disaster unevenly, due to their directionality.

But Julie is a change maker. “My superpower is to help groups of people to move in the same direction,” she says. Her superpower is facilitative leadership, and with it, she’s bringing a watershed of change to the Mystic.