ROOTED IN TRUST.
Taproot Partners works with groups and organizations committed to advancing equity, justice, and community power.
I offer strategic consulting, facilitation, and thought partnership to help organizations navigate change, strengthen their work, and turn their commitments into action.
Explore our workI'm Stephanie Gyldenvand, founder of Taproot Partners. I bring more than 20 years of experience in community organizing, public health, philanthropy, and nonprofit leadership. Working within institutions and alongside communities seeking to change them has shaped my understanding of strategy, relationships, and power.
I bring strategic judgment, facilitation, organizational experience, and an understanding of how power operates across communities and institutions.
Curiosity is central to how I work. I’m interested in what people know, how they understand their experiences, and what we can learn by asking different questions. I value honest relationships, practical thinking, and the willingness to challenge assumptions, including my own.
I believe communities hold wisdom, relationships, leadership, and power that are too often overlooked or constrained. Advancing justice requires recognizing those strengths while also examining the structures, practices, and decisions that limit how power is shared and exercised.
Organizations can be deeply committed to change while relying on familiar ways of working that no longer serve their purpose. I help groups look honestly at those tensions, question assumptions, and explore what different approaches might make possible.
No organization gets everything right. What matters is how we respond when contradictions become visible, and whether we're willing to learn, take responsibility, and change our practices.
My approach combines experience, strategic thinking, curiosity, and a willingness to challenge and be challenged. I value honest reflection, shared accountability, and the relationships that allow people to work through difficult questions, make decisions, and put those decisions into practice.
Taproot Partners offers strategic consulting, facilitation, and thought partnership across three interconnected areas of practice.
I help organizations navigate major decisions and transitions, examine how their structures and practices support their purpose, and develop strategies for moving forward.
This can include strategic planning, organizational assessment, governance and decision-making design, and strengthening shared leadership and accountability.
I work with groups and coalitions to build relationships, understand and shift power, and develop strategies for collective action.
This includes community engagement that shapes strategy and decisions, power and relationship mapping, coalition development, narrative strategy, and coordinated efforts toward policy and systems change.
I partner with organizations and funders to rethink how resources are raised, distributed, and governed.
This includes community-centered fundraising, resource development, grantmaking strategy, and approaches that give communities greater influence over funding priorities and decisions.
Every partnership is different. Some begin with a clearly defined project. Others begin with a challenge, a question, or a sense that something needs to change.
Let's start with a conversation about what you're navigating and what you're hoping to accomplish. We can explore whether working together would be a good fit.
Email Stephaniestephanie@taproot.partners