Uncovering the resilience and emergent potential of living systems thinking
Emergent Roots is the work of Kate Leftin and Claudia Menasche, who are united by a desire to support individuals to imagine and co-create conditions for a flourishing and resilient future. The interconnected polycrisis of our times has revealed deep vulnerabilities for local businesses of all sizes and the communities that surround them. Yet, this also represents an opportunity for leaders to become levers for change that strengthens resilience in themselves, their organization, and their community.
Resilience is usually considered the ability for people or organizations to bounce back to what was a perceived steady state before a disruption happened. We take it further. Rather than bounce back, we want to help organizations bounce forward into the ability to adapt to multiple emerging conditions as they unfold.
This kind of resilience exists along multiple dimensions, but the four domains we highlight in our work are economic, climate, social, and ecosystem resilience.
Interconnected Disruptions
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According to the 2026 Gallup poll, employee engagement is at 31% in the US and 17% of workers are actively disengaged or “quiet quitting”. The American Psychological Association's 2024 Work in America survey reports that workers experiencing higher psychological safety at work tended to report more positive sentiments about a variety of factors such as overrall job satisfaction, satisfaction with work relationships and monetary compensation, and confidence in themselves and in their organizational leaders.
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According to Inova’s 2025 Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA), one of the top 3 community health concerns in Northern Virginia is mental health and substance abuse. Likewise, Medstar Health’s 2024 CHNA, measuring health needs in DC zip codes, found that 38% of people reported mental health as a top concern and 14% of respondents said that social isolation and loneliness were priority health concern in their community. According to Wellhub's State of Work-Life Wellness 2026 report, 62% of employees say community and social support are essential for sustaining long-term wellness habits.
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The Virginia Climate Assessment, published by George Mason University in 2025, reports that the state is seeing more extreme temperatures, that leads to problems with human health, agriculture, and infrastructure. Higher precipitation levels and increasing risks of flooding leads to transportation disruptions, loss of property, more pests, and more risks to human health. Nevertheless, Virginia is already aiming to take a systems-lens approach in their legislation to create the Office of Commonwealth Resilience and Chief Resilience Officer by focusing on maximizing co-benefits in the state's response to climate impacts and implementation of resilience and adaptation strategies.
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The fragmentation of natural landscapes across Virginia, especially in urban areas, is a major driver of biodiversity decline. The built environment to accommodate urban sprawl has led to severing connectivity for wildlife, making them unable to access habitats that are most suitable. To protect wildlife habitats, the Virginia General Assembly is creating a leadership team for the Wildlife Corridor Action Plan that includes the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources, Department of Transportation, Department of Conservation and Recreation, and Department of Forestry. The plan will focus on creating a biodiversity framework that identifies where targeted partnerships should be established and opportunities for collaboration.
This data highlights different symptoms of the same problem: We have disconnected from each other and the living systems that support us. Understanding effective leverage points for creating health in our social systems and businesses creates the opportunity to regenerate thriving futures where current systems are failing.
What Makes Us Different
We will never show up to your organization with a formulaic list of solutions to implement. Your organization is a unique expression of the people in it and how those people interact with the larger environment. Rather than prescriptions, we facilitate a process for you and your team(s) to co-create solutions towards a shared vision.
We recognize that local businesses and the communities around them are intricately connected to each other. These organizations are not only employers, but they serve vital roles in people’s lives, such as providing gathering places, housing, health care, groceries, or a well cooked meal.
This represents a crucial opportunity at a moment when our extractive systems are catching up to us in the form of climate change, a loneliness epidemic, quiet quitting, economic hardship, and ecological collapse. Businesses that are willing to meet these disruptions by recognizing how they can build greater adaptive capacity for the community around them will become more resilient as well.
Meet the Team
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Claudia Menasche
COFOUNDER
Claudia Menasche is an environmental policy expert, entrepreneur, and systems thinker with over a decade of experience turning research into impactful climate action. She holds a Master of Public Health from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she focused on the intersections of food systems, climate, and public health. She has led and supported major regulations at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the Toxic Substances Control Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, bridging policy, business, and community engagement to advance holistic health.
Leading rulemakings taught her that lasting change requires integrating diverse stakeholder needs, turning competing interests into complementary ones, much like relationships found in nature. As a RegenIntel Fellow, she designed workshops to help industry move from extractive to regenerative practices. At Emergent Roots, she provides systems-based leadership consulting and leads community events to foster the relationships and creative collaboration needed to meet today’s interconnected challenges.
As a Certified Personal Trainer, Claudia believes regeneration begins within, restoring human and planetary health through systems of resilience and renewal. Claudia is committed to building an economy and society that nourishes and empowers each of its parts to function as a whole system. -
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Kate Leftin
COFOUNDER
Kate Leftin’s combined experience in psychotherapy and sustainability spans over 16 years. She holds a Master of Social Work from Washington University in St. Louis and a Master of Natural Resources from Virginia Tech. She is deeply trained in systems-thinking through both of these disciplines, which has shaped her perspective of how the intersecting crises in mental health, loneliness, climate change, and organizational health intersect in self perpetuating ways. Through courses with The Capital Institute and nRhythm, she has further developed her knowledge of regenerative economics, regenerative leadership, organizational design, and living systems.She is also a forest bathing guide in training, offering sensory immersive experiences in natural settings around Northern Virginia. She sees these experiences as a way to help people reconnect with the more-than-human world, with potential to build community, unlock creativity, and enhance a sense of wellbeing.
She loves to hike, garden, and observe local wildlife. As a mother to a wonderful and fiercely independent 6-year old, she hopes to help build a world worth passing on.
Our Story
As a therapist turned sustainability consultant, Kate became increasingly bothered by the prevalence of the fear based narrative in the climate community. This is not because there are not concerns, but because fear-based narratives more often induce paralysis rather than action. When the government sector went through a period of unprecedented job loss in the DC area, it seemed many people adopted an unspoken assumption that the future will be straight out of a Hollywood dystopian plot.
Claudia arrived from a different direction. A deep love of regenerative agriculture had pulled her toward a larger realization: that the ecological, social, and economic crises unraveling around us are not separate problems with separate solutions. They are one interconnected crisis, and the siloed way we've been trying to solve them is itself part of what's breaking down.
Drawn together by shared concern about a growing sense of helplessness that could easily become inaction and about fragmentation, Kate and Claudia enrolled in several courses, one of them being The Capital Institute's Regenerative Economics course. It became the foundation of everything that followed.
Inspired by Rob Hopkins’ “How to Fall in Love with the Future”, Kate organized a small pilot workshop in Arlington, VA to facilitate a process for people to imagine what a positive, but realistic future, might look like. Claudia attended that first workshop. This was the first of what would become the Collective Refuturing Workshops. There were more discussions about how they could help communities and organizations co-create systems level change through their combined experience with sustainability, health care, community resilience, climate and health policy, food systems, psychology, and systems thinking. Eventually, Emergent Roots was born.
What began as an emergent reaction to the disturbing interplay of our failing systems, declining sense of hope and agency, and the ever present threat of climate change, became a collaborative venture to help businesses and communities co-create systems level change.
