Our Team
Our team meets you wherever you are in your journey, learning about your needs and story to explore what’s possible.
Then, informed by your unique strengths and experiences, we provide a range of strategies and services to help you navigate complexity with confidence.
Meet Tristan
Tristan Oliff | Founder & Principal Consultant
An experienced communicator and community builder, Tristan aspires to use his energy and expertise to promote meaningful collaboration and facilitate equitable social change.
His professional journey has led him through Parliament Hill, into the non-profit world, and around the new media movement, providing a unique background that he now deploys to assist clients tell their stories and communicating clearly.
With South African and French Canadian roots, Tristan resides in Ottawa, where he has lived for the past 8 years, with his wife and two cats.
Meet Tia
Tia Wong | Creative Consultant
Tia Wong is a community organizer, graphic designer, and communications professional based in Ottawa and Toronto. She has volunteered and worked with organizations related to gender-based violence, reproductive health, climate science, and the arts over the past decade and a half.
Tia joined Roots of Purpose to help bring stories to life through meaningful visual design and tailored communications. Outside of work, you’ll find Tia at the movie theatre or enjoying live music.
Frequent Collaborators
Amanda Palmer | Facilitation & Strategic Planning
Amanda is a facilitator for social change and a community development leader who believes we can transform our communities to be places of deep belonging, rooted in justice, where everyone thrives for generations. Amanda’s practice draws on participatory methods, playful, and creative tools to create spaces of deep connection and possibility amongst diverse groups of people.
Amanda has more than 15 years of professional experience across government, academia, and the nonprofit sector, including over a decade of working directly with communities to deepen their engagement and support their efforts for social change. She is the co-founder of the Ottawa Facilitation Community of Practice, and sits on the Mechanicsville Community Association board.
Tarras Zellerbach-Adams | Motion & Graphic Design
Tarras is a graphic designer, animator, and illustrator living on the unceded and stolen traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Tarras brings a breadth of experience in supporting organizations to deepen their impact and operations through unique visual content and knowledge translation. She has expertise across a range of disciplines, from publication design to illustration and animation, and is grounded in her commitment as an artist to support movement-building for causes they believe in.