Successfully Optimizing Today’s Diverse Workforce, Social Missions, and Community Spaces
The world has changed, and you don't want to be left behind.
Navigating ever-changing social landscapes and contexts, and finding ways to build trust, collaboration and shared vision is a widespread goal across industries, sectors, and groups.
Yet many of the old approaches and checkboxes don't bring lasting results.
Brave Sis Projects facilitations and advising extend far beyond “Checkbox DEI,” helping to insert a holistic, person-led approach to leadership and action and supporting organizations in enabling safe and sustainable problem-solving.
In this particularly galvanizing moment, we have an opportunity to rethink interracial/cross-cultural relationships and get it right. We have all been raised in a society that fractures authentic intercultural appreciation, awareness, and inclusion — often through no deliberate fault of our own. With her deep personal experience navigating across difference, Rozella brings a uniquely relatable approach to guide us towards lasting change.
Author and global social impact thought leader Rozella (Rozie) Kennedy has 25+ years’ experience designing, implementing, influencing, and coaching for community and social sector impact across sectors — from fundraising and communications to project design, event management, and people leadership.
At the core of this work has been an ardent commitment to centering diversity, inclusion, equity, and justice as essential operationalizers of individual growth and systems change, and helping colleagues and clients build authentic, heartfelt, and generative practices to sustain these shifts.
Individual Growth and Group Acceleration
Brave Sis Project advances these outcomes through two vectors:
- Individual Growth: self-paced learning and reflection through an eleven-module self-paced course entitled Allies, Advocates, Co-Conspirators, Friends, Sisters: A Playbook for Leading, Learning, and Liberation. This learning experience explores the complexities of and possibilities in building authentic collaborations, relationships, and — yes — even friendships across race, culture, ethnicity, and class.
- Through an engaging combination of learning resources and self-reflection, participants will discover 10 "plays" to move along a trajectory of 3Ls: Learning, Leadership, and Liberation. Designed for individual engagement, the course can also be formulated as an organizational learning cohort, with group-led facilitation and/or additional direct facilitation sessions led by Brave Sis Project.
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Leadership Development and/or Strategic Advisory to Directly Embed Authentic and Sustainable Equity
- Working directly with clients, Kennedy and Brave Sis Project assists boards, employee resource groups (ERGs), philanthropic and nonprofit groups, and others in using these tools and tactics to design successful diversity and inclusion, equitable praxis, and cultures of belonging and mattering.
- Learn about Kennedy's Organizational Development Blueprint: Solving for Deeper Integration of Equity Principles for Work Groups and Enterprises (15 min. video)
- One-off workshops and speaking engagements are also available to support group cohesion, learning, and celebration
Doing Big Work Needn’t Be A Dour Undertaking!
To provide engaging, responsive pedagogy Brave Sis Project Facilitations and Advisory draw upon many design resources, from DEI “classics,” to the ISO standard for Diversity and Inclusion, to materials from human psychology, popular culture, self-help tools, and — unique to this practice — the stories of BIPOC women leaders in history as cornerstones for intersectional celebration and de-centering of default whiteness narratives and monocultural hegemony. At the vanguard of melding praxis and personality, Kennedy guides learners through the blind spots, legacy biases, and social complexities that impede belonging and strong collaboration.
About Rozella Kennedy
Rozella Kennedy is a principled, inclusive, and results-driven leader, builder, strategist, and connector with extensive experience designing, implementing, influencing, and coaching community and social impact. She founded Brave Sis Project in 2019 to celebrate and center little-known BIPOC women in U.S. history. Her 2024 Nautilus Award-winning book Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History heralds 100 (mostly little-known) BIPOC women through the 18-20th centuries with inspiring stories followed by short prompts that invite reflection or action to help continue the legacy of these changemakers today.
Rozella is pleased to impart her robust background in nonprofit management and global social impact advisory to clients and groups worldwide, including Amazon, the Gates Foundation, Centerstone (multi-state nonprofit health care provider specializing in mental health and substance use disorder treatments), Higher Heights for America, the New Mexico Chapter of the Scholars Strategy Network (SSN), Opportunity Collaboration, the Skoll Foundation, and the United Way of Ames, Iowa. She brings a cheerful, approachable demeanor to her leadership and facilitation. LinkedIn.
Book Events
Leverage stories of Brave Foremothers as a tool to unleash problem-solving and build Belonging and Mattering: Kennedy customizes book events based on Our Brave Foremothers and/or other BIPOC she-roes with a Q&A/breakout session directed towards specific topics of pertinence to your team, This enhances individual learning and appreciation of difference across race/cultural/ethnic difference.
Click here for writing samples, recent events, and speaking/podcast topics