About
Community knowledge is intelligence.
Sunroot Systems is a community intelligence company that helps organizations better understand the people and communities they serve—and turn what they learn into meaningful action.
We work at the intersection of research, community engagement, strategy, learning, and storytelling, designing processes that recognize communities as more than participants or sources of feedback. Communities are knowledge holders with expertise about their experiences, histories, relationships, strengths, challenges, and possibilities.
Our work creates ways to gather that knowledge thoughtfully, make meaning of it collaboratively, and translate it into strategies, programs, policies, resources, stories, and systems.
Our Approach
Our work is grounded in a few core commitments:
Community knowledge matters.
People hold expertise about their own communities, experiences, relationships, histories, and environments.
Research is relational.
How knowledge is gathered matters. Trust, reciprocity, transparency, and relationship are part of the research process—not separate from it.
Communities should shape meaning.
Participation should extend beyond providing information. Whenever possible, communities should have opportunities to respond to, challenge, deepen, and validate how their knowledge is interpreted.
Strengths matter, too.
Understanding challenges is important. So is understanding what communities value, what is already working, and which people, relationships, practices, organizations, and resources help communities thrive.
Knowledge should move.
Research should not end with a report. What we learn should inform decisions, strategies, programs, policies, resources, relationships, stories, and action.
Why Sunroot Systems
Too often, organizations engage communities after priorities have already been established, collect information without creating meaningful pathways for it to influence decisions, or produce research that never makes its way back to the people who contributed to it.
Sunroot approaches this work differently.
We believe the process of learning from communities should be rigorous, relational, participatory, and useful.
That means asking better questions. Building trust before expecting people to share. Creating multiple ways for people to contribute knowledge. Looking for assets and possibilities alongside challenges. Bringing findings back to communities for interpretation and validation. Ensuring what is learned is used.
We call this Community Intelligence: the knowledge, experiences, relationships, histories, assets, and insights held within communities that can help organizations understand complex systems and make better decisions.
Meet the Founder
LaNaya Butler, Founder & Community Intelligence Strategist
Dr. LaNaya Butler is a researcher, facilitator, educator, and systems strategist whose work explores how organizations can learn with communities rather than simply about them.
Her work spans community-based research, qualitative inquiry, community engagement, facilitation, participatory methods, systems thinking, and research-driven storytelling. She has designed and facilitated community-centered initiatives across Colorado involving public policy, education, health and well-being, culture and the humanities, community development, and organizational strategy.
LaNaya earned her PhD in Curriculum & Instruction from the University of Denver, where her research examined the experiences of undergraduate students in Africana Studies and explored community-based, participatory approaches to knowledge generation. Through her doctoral research, she developed Objectvoice, a participatory elicitation method that uses meaningful objects to support reflection, storytelling, and knowledge generation.
She also holds a Master of Arts in International Studies with a specialization in Conflict Resolution from the University of Denver and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Africana Studies from Rutgers University.
Across her research and professional practice, LaNaya is particularly interested in what happens after people are invited to the table: how their knowledge is gathered, how it is interpreted, who gets to make meaning from it, and how it influences action.
She founded Sunroot Systems to build better answers to those questions—and to create research, engagement, and strategy processes that treat community knowledge as intelligence capable of shaping systems.
Contact Us
Work with Sunroot to build research, engagement, and strategy rooted in community knowledge.