About

For the last decade, I’ve had the joy of bringing people together—organizing donors and leaders across local and national movements for racial, gender, and economic justice, and helping resources find their way back into communities and organizations working to repair the world.

Along the way, I’ve had the privilege of stewarding some of the most transformative investments in our shared work for justice and liberation: gifts that helped launch the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund, secured the largest federal investment in child care in our nation’s history, and protected patients’ access to lifesaving reproductive health medications at the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 2018, I was introduced to Deepa Iyer’s Social Change Ecosystem Framework, and it gave language to something I had always felt in my spirit—that movements are sustained not just by power and resources, but through relationships. I quickly shed the title of fundraiser, and started seeing myself as a weaver.

“Weavers: We see the through-lines of connectivity between people, places, organizations, ideas, and movements.” Deepa Iyer, The Social Change Map

The practice of weaving lives in my lineage. My people are the Toba Batak, from North Sumatra, Indonesia. In our culture, we believe there are three sources of warmth that sustain us: the sun, fire, and ulos—our sacred cloth. For generations, Batak people have woven ulos to keep cultural memory alive, to memorialize moments of transition, and to strengthen relationships through the practice of gifting.

I wove the Ulos Group in that same spirit: to honor ancestral practice, and to support movements by weaving together people, resources, and possibility—thoughtfully, relationally, and with love.

We are honored to be your partners in the hard and necessary work of repair.

Dalam solidaritas,

Joshua Tobing

Founder, Ulos Group