About
Resilient Roots LLC is dedicated to providing high quality, evidence-based strategic leadership, facilitation, collaboration building and training services to public service decision-makers.
Our Vision
Vision: Communities and their decision makers have the knowledge, skills, tools, and training to provide adaptable, future-ready leadership in times of change and uncertainty. Decisions are made using place-based, context informed capacity building approaches that maximize community assets and create new opportunities for communities to grow and thrive. Decision-making is inclusive of impactees as decision partners. Planning and implementation of decisions is asset-focused and builds opportunity through strategic partnerships and investments.
Our Mission
To resource community decisionmakers with need-based, future-ready knowledge, skills, tools, and processes that increase their capacity to lead through and thrive in times of change and uncertainty.
Services Provided
Who we serve
We Currently Serve the Following Professionals.
Resilient Roots LLC serves leaders, decision makers, and other professionals seeking to upskill in order to undertake complex new tasks. We work with organizations in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. A common thread among our clients is a desire to work through and embrace the challenges that come with uncertainty and change and a commitment to embrace strategic resilience building approaches. When possible, we encourage teams, collaborations and cohorts to train, learn and work together to increase the power of resilience building and the likelihood of meeting their resilience goals.
Brenda M. Zollitsch, PhD | Founder and President, Resilient Roots LLC
Dr. Brenda Zollitsch has been leading organizational capacity and collaboration building at the local, regional and national level for over 25 years. Her work serves government, nonprofit, and business organizations seeking to optimize their operations and thrive in times of change. Brenda brings to her work rich experience in stakeholder engagement, consensus building, building partnerships to create new opportunities, and providing evidence-based research and analysis to inform decision-making.
As an expert ‘boundary-spanner,’ Brenda is experienced in working with leaders to guide their work facilitating, listening and responding to diverse perspectives and finding paths forward across institutional, sectoral and geographic boundaries. Brenda is a skilled grant writer, trainer and facilitator with a passion for catalyzing impactful public service-focused projects.
Brenda founded Resilient Roots LLC to help guide organizations develop more robust organizational systems and initiatives to manage expected and unexpected changes. In this work, she guides leaders as they explore ways to plan for and through complexity, disruptions, and uncertainty. In addition to training, coaching and project work, Resilient Roots offers a wide range of scenario-based learning (SBL) exercises to clients, including moderated and stand-alone scenarios designed to scaffold capacity building for organizational leadership, boards, staff, and their partners.
Brenda’s leadership experience over the last twenty-five years includes having served as a senior administrator of continuing education for Boston University School of Medicine, executive director of a Maine-based youth development foundation, University-based resource development officer, senior policy analyst for a national environmental nonprofit, and facilitator of a regional stormwater-focused collaboration. She has also worked extensively analyzing and informing decision making around the Clean Water Act and other federal water-related policy decisions.
Brenda earned her PhD in Public Policy from the University of Southern Maine in 2012. She also has a double master’s degree from Boston University. She has served as university faculty in both full-time and adjunct positions at the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Service for the last 10 years, where she teaches a wide range of courses to graduate students, primarily in the areas of public policy analysis, organizational leadership, and resilience planning.
