Bring us your
brand new
problems.

Ruth Silver, Founder & Partner

Ruth is a listener, collector and pattern finder with a knack for making sense of where we’re at collectively and revealing new opportunities for more fulfilling human experiences. Before founding Groundswell, Ruth worked with Annie Liebovitz, Bruce Mau, Urban Strategies and Decode. With a BA in Fine Art & Indigenous Studies from McMaster and a Master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design she’s taught design at the Universities of Toronto and Waterloo, OCADU and Harvard. Her projects have been featured in the Toronto Star, the Grid, MIT news, and extolled by the White House (Obama administration).

Olga Semenovych, Partner

Olga’s profound passion for collaborative governance has led her to Jamaica, Philippines, Ethiopia, Ukraine and to the inner suburbs of Toronto, to support community-led change, economic development and innovation. During her 6-year tenure with the Canadian Urban Institute (CUI) she led extensive stakeholder engagement through creative participatory processes. While at the CUI Olga supported the management of federal government-funded projects with annual budgets of over a million dollars that partnered with national and municipal-level governments agencies overseas. Olga now leads the Resilient Communities Practice at Groundswell and has a strong understanding of the needs and challenges of small businesses and start-ups, especially in the context of neighbourhood change and evolving retail industry patterns.

Groundswell brings organizations and the people they serve together. Through design research, community engagement and strategic thinking, we see hidden patterns that inspire resonant outcomes. While our process is consistently rooted in design thinking, our methods, team, and project outcomes are bespoke, because each question we ask and each context we solve it for is unique.