Suzanne Bendick - The Stories That Connect Us

Guest Bio: 

Suzanne Bendick is the Co-Executive Director, co-founder, and former board member of Roots Family Collaborative, a highly respected and deeply impactful organization she has helped shape over the past nine years. A devoted mother of two, Suzanne is a visionary nonprofit leader known for her thoughtful approach, deep listening, and unwavering commitment to improving community health and wellbeing.

Her professional background includes formal training as a Postpartum Doula, Certified Lactation Counselor, and Montessori Teacher, and she is currently expanding her expertise as a student of Somatic Experiencing. Grounded by a love of nature and a passion for meaningful connection, Suzanne brings both heart and skill to her work supporting families. 

Episode Description: 

In this inspiring episode of the LIFTS Podcast, host Emily Freeman talks with Suzanne Bendick, Co-Executive Director of Roots Family Collaborative in Bozeman, about how one mom’s personal experience of isolation led to a movement supporting families across Montana.

Suzanne shares the origin story of Roots, the creation of the powerful “Moms Like Me” storytelling project, and how storytelling can heal, connect, and transform communities. Through honest reflection, she highlights the importance of listening, collaboration, and grassroots action in building strong perinatal mental health support systems — especially in Montana’s rural and frontier communities.

Highlights include:

• How Roots Family Collaborative was born from lived experience
• The origins and impact of the Moms Like Me storytelling project
• Why listening is a radical act of support for new parents
• Tips for communities wanting to start similar efforts in their own areas

Suzanne’s message:
“You don’t have to have a plan. Just start by coming together — ask questions, listen, and build from there.”

Learn more:

•  ROOTS Family Collaborative: www.rootsfamilycollaborative.com
• Moms Like Me storytelling project: https://www.rootsfamilycollaborative.com/moms-like-me

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Transcript

Emily Freeman, HMHB-MT: 0:04

Welcome to season five of the LIFTS podcast, where we connect with parents, caregivers, providers, and advocates for Montana families in the early years of parenting. Through personal stories of lived experience and expert insights, we highlight the people and programs that are helping families thrive. I'm Emily Freeman and this is The LIFTS Podcast, A project of Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies, the Montana Coalition.

Suzanne: 0:31

My name is Suzanne Bendick. I am the co-executive director at Roots Family Collaborative. We are based out of Bozeman. We are a nonprofit organization serving families from preconception through parenthood. We provide support groups, a resource guide that goes out in the hospital systems in independent provider offices in our community. We also put together annual events to bring mothers and families together around perinatal mental health.

Emily: 1:03

How did Roots come to be? What is the quick origin story of your organization?

Suzanne: 1:09

Roots, was partly born out of my own, becoming of a mother. And my first daughter was born in 2010, and I really had always wanted to be a mom. And then when I became a mom, I realized how hard it actually was and found myself feeling really isolated and overwhelmed and not really understanding why. So I sent myself on a quest of trying to figure that out and became a lactation counselor because I had struggles with breastfeeding. I became a postpartum doula because I struggled with kind of the day-to-day humble tasks of daily living. And knew that there, that I couldn't possibly be the only mother in the world who was struggling. And so Roots was born partly out of my story, but partly out of a desire for our community to have a more coordinated effort to support young and growing families. There were lots of things in our community at the time when my daughter was born, like mommy and me yoga and mommy and me books and babies and things like that, that we're really focused on. Babies and focus on my daughter's care. But there were not a lot of programs that were focused on the wellbeing and the health of the parents themselves. And so Roots came out of a lot of conversations with local midwives and community leaders and other mothers. Who really felt like we had all of these abundant resources here. We just needed kind of a hub or a connection spot for those resources to become more highlighted or more accessible for families to reach to.

Emily: 3:03

I love that you took your own experience and used. That as motivation to extend a hand to the next mom in line who was feeling that same thing. Talk about the Moms Like Me Project, this is your storytelling project through Roots.

Suzanne: 3:19

Moms Like Me is in its 10th year this year, which is really exciting. Moms Like Me was actually born alongside the same time that Roots Incorporated as a nonprofit. So, Moms Like Me started out of really, a desire for moms to create something bigger for other mothers to not feel alone. In 2016, there was a tragedy in our community where a mother took her life and her baby and her partner, and we knew that mothers were suffering in silence. And even though we didn't know the details of that particular story, we knew that there were mothers in our community who felt alone and felt overwhelmed and felt isolated, and we wanted to do something about that. And so actually it really was pretty casual. There were probably seven women who came together. We met at a coffee house in June of 2016 and sat around the table sharing experiences about why it's important for mothers to be able to share their open and honest stories of motherhood and how powerful that could be. And we really didn't know what we were creating at the time. We just knew that we were coming together and we wanted to do something. And over the course of the next eight months or so, an idea kind of fleshed itself out where we thought, oh, wouldn't it be awesome if we could get mothers from our community to come to to a public stage and share their open, raw experiences of becoming mothers in an effort to allow other people to feel less alone. And so we started planning this event and, it's funny, I don't think we had a name for it right away. And it, it took quite a while to think about what the name was. But we landed on Moms Like Me because we kept saying, these issues around postpartum. We're not immune to those. Everybody could experience those issues, anybody. So we wanted it to feel approachable so that somebody could come. And so we came to Moms Like Me, was the name that we decided upon. And we spent many months trying to figure out, okay, who are we gonna get to tell these stories? And we started reaching out into our rolodexes of friends and contacts. And it was like crickets and nobody was responding and nobody wanted to stand up and share their story. And so we looked around the table at one of our meetings and said to each other, okay, I guess we're gonna have to be the ones to tell the stories. And so there were three of us who were on that initial committee who ended up sharing our stories that first year. And part of Moms Like Me. In the early days, and especially in that first one, we really wanted to highlight the resources that were available in our community. So anybody who was working with mothers pregnancy through Early Parenthood. We wanted to bring those providers to the stage so that folks in our community could look at those people. Those people could share about what they do and why they do it. And then we could break down this stigma of reaching out for help. So yeah, that first year we had, I think we probably had five or six professionals. So I think we had a family practice doctor, we had an O-B-G-Y-N, we had a mental health provider, we had um, a home visitor. And after this, after the storytellers were done, we had a panel that was moderated by a fellow mom who was just asking questions about what is it that you do and why is it important that this community knows about it? So it was both like storytelling, like very powerful storytelling experience, but also an educational opportunity for folks in the community too. That sounds really neat.

Emily: 7:30

Because you think of those things often as living separately, right? But the idea that you would be pairing that with an educational opportunity. So if someone hears something from that story that really resonates with them and instead of being like, oh, I loved hearing that woman's story. It really resonated with me full stop. They can be like, I loved hearing that mom's story, it really resonated with me and it also makes me realize maybe I could reach out and get more support right now. Yeah. And maybe there, that's, there's no shame in that. And oh, here's a warm handoff to a local provider who could provide that support. What a beautiful pairing of kind of art and health

Suzanne: 8:01

Exactly. And I think that was the goal. The goal was to marry those two things for our community because we didn't want providers to be separate from the community. We wanted it to feel integrated and we wanted folks to really understand that there are abundant resources out here available to take care of you. And here they are, right here and this is how you access them. And so we, we use the storytelling component as a way in or as a way to get people in and then. An added benefit was that folks also got to learn about the resources that were available because we didn't want anybody to feel alone ever.

Emily: 8:45

Can you talk about a time when you saw or felt the transformative power of storytelling?

Suzanne: 8:50

Generally speaking what has happened at Moms Like Me over the years is every year. We've had between three and five storytellers and every year after the event, there are mothers who will email or who will call and say, I went to Moms Like Me. How can I get involved? I could tell some specific stories about that because there are moms who went to Moms Like Me pregnant for the first time. That have gone on to become storytellers at Moms Like Me or folks that were in the audience who have now gone on to be part of the planning committee for Moms Like Me over time. And I think that's maybe we had hoped, I think we did hope that it would ripple in that way, but we didn't realize how quickly it would ripple in that way. That after that first event. I was, I had the honor of being one of the first storytellers for Moms Like Me. And after the event, I remember people coming up to me in coffee shops and around town and saying, I heard you speak at that event. Thank you so much for sharing your story. Thank you so much for putting this on. And this last year we had a really dynamic and powerful Moms Like Me in the spring. And I actually was sitting beside a grandmother at my son's fifth grade graduation, and she looked at me and she said, you look familiar. And then she put it together and she said, oh, you're the one who does moms Like Me. I came this year. And she said it was the most powerful experience ever. And she felt like when she looked out, it wasn't just young moms or like new moms expecting moms. It was there were folks there who were grandparents, there were grandfathers there and she just kept saying, I wish I had had something like this when I was younger. And so I think those are the stories that come forward always from Moms Like Me. That people say, I wish I had had this, or this is incredible how can I get involved in this? And it's just this ripple. We know that when you come and you witness when you're present for someone's story, it changes you. And so folks who come to Moms Like Me really do shift and they become more open to and maybe more compassionate around this time in life.

Emily: 11:26

I think it demonstrates a real hunger for authentic connection and for authenticity and vulnerability and everything that often does not come with our parenthood experience. And just like maybe that core human need to connect on an authentic, real true open level. If someone listening to this is from another community, so you, you serve the Bozeman area, is that

Suzanne: 11:54

Yep. And Park County. Okay. Yep. And we are working on creating another group down in Big Sky.

Emily: 12:02

If someone is listening, say from a rural area or an under-resourced area where they're hearing this, this sounds inspiring. They'd love to get it started, but where to begin? Do you provide any kind of support for storytelling efforts in communities, outside of yours?

Suzanne: 12:19

That's a good question. That's something that we're working on. And I think part of the vision or part of the dream at Roots has always been to help support other communities to find something like Roots or to find their thing. And it doesn't have to be Roots, it doesn't have to be a nonprofit organization. And we are working right now to figure out how do we help other communities learn about what we have learned in the last 10 years? Because I think kind of on this vein of storytelling, root Roots has a story too. Roots has a story of how we were started and what we started with, and how that's grown, and how things have changed and how things have shifted in our community from both parents and families accessing care to providers who have more information and resources about each other and this stage in life. So there's that piece. But I think for folks who are listening, who care about families, maybe who are parents themselves, I think all it really takes is getting together and finding those other people who also care about it. I think when I think back to the early days of Roots and really the early days of Moms Like Me, it was just folks who wanted to do something and that literally was the language. We were like, we just wanna do something and we don't know exactly what it is. But we know there's something pulling at us. And maybe that's back to what you were saying earlier about this need to connect with other people. That's, I think that's where it starts. And so, folks can come together anywhere and that like maybe at the library or if you have like early childhood coalitions and lots of communities in the state already exist and those are great places for these kinds of conversations to happen. Like what are moms doing? I think that that was the question that we initially asked ourselves, like, where are all the moms going? How do moms connect with each other? How do moms connect with their community? And how do moms connect with their story and how could we provide that? And we have been an organization since 2017, so we currently have an office space and we have a meeting space here that that is ours that we. Rent out to other organizations, but we host things in our own space. But there was a time when we were using space at the library and we were using space that other folks were donating to us to be able to just come together. And really it doesn't. Doesn't take a lot much more than that.

Emily: 15:03

I love that idea of creating an idea in community with other people. You don't have to have a fully formed plan. And even that idea of arriving at a meeting with questions, not answers? So you're saying like, we don't necessarily know exactly what this meeting's about or exactly what the goal is but we have these questions that we want to chew on as a group.

Suzanne: 15:24

To have like the objectives all lined out that, I think we get overwhelmed by that and it can often deter us from wanting to come together when we feel like there has to be like a set outcome.

Emily: 15:38

Right.

Suzanne: 15:39

And I think what we have learned at Roots is that there are so many passionate people in the community. They might not have a million letters after their name, or maybe they do. But they have the passion and they want to come together to do something. And that's exactly how we started at Roots. Other communities have asked our team over the years, like, should we do this? Or how could we get this off the ground? And a lot of times this is like a personal thing, but I'm always like, just go, just do it. Just do it. Some do it somehow. Come together and ask the questions. We even did last year, we did a focus group because we were trying to figure out what is it that our community needs to hear from Moms Like Me? And this was a specific thing, but we didn't exactly know what we wanted to ask, but we knew that there were questions that were swirling around with new and expecting parents, but we didn't have access to them unless we asked them. And so we brought folks together over three rounds and the only objective was just to listen. And it was a great starting place and we took a lot of notes and we pulled out some themes that were coming up across all of those focus groups. And those were the themes that were able to guide us into our Moms Like Me speakers for last year, which was really fascinating.

Emily: 17:01

Thinking that word listening and the idea of a listening session. When you think about that season of life where there's a lot of focus on listening to the experts, that idea of turning the ear to mom and being like, we're here to listen to you. This is about listening to what you want and need.

Suzanne: 17:18

Yeah. I feel like there's probably a guarantee that somebody else has that question. They just haven't had the opportunity to answer it or to ask it. And I think if you have that question, somebody else does too.

Emily: 17:33

Absolutely. It's like what you say to a quiet classroom of students when you've asked a question and sometimes you have to encourage'em and say, Hey, I bet if you have a question like four other people do too, so you may as well raise your hand and get it answered on behalf of all those quieter folks beside you.

Suzanne: 17:48

We say that all the time in our groups here at Roots too, because you know that's why people are coming and sometimes it feels. Maybe unfamiliar to be the first person to ask, but we always say, I guarantee somebody else has that question too. So, listening is super important and I think parents in this stage often feel like they're not listened to and they feel unheard. And so if we really can create spaces where we are actually listening, it's so beneficial for everybody.

Emily: 18:20

Well, and for some people, even just the idea of speaking in a group or speaking about your experience, it's a learned space and If you are someone who has never had your voice valued or never been told that your voice mattered or, told that your voice actually didn't matter. It's gonna be harder for you to be that mom who's in a doctor's office advocating for your kid. It's a beautiful thing to share your personal experience on a stage. It's also a really important, powerful thing to be able to harness that same voice with a provider or with someone in a school system or someone with the state.

Suzanne: 18:56

That's an important piece of the work that happens in our groups here at Roots is practicing that. Mm-hmm. Um, because like you said not everybody's gonna get up on a public stage and do a perf a performative event like Moms Like Me. What we hope deep down at Roots is that when parents are coming to our programs or interfacing in any way with what we do as an organization, they are learning how to listen to what they need and advocate for what they need because they get to practice that in a space here. Thank you for kind of highlighting that piece.

Emily: 19:34

And so if someone wants to get involved in their, in your area, they can reach out. But even it sounds like you're open to people statewide reaching out.

Suzanne: 19:44

Yeah, absolutely. I think folks from across the state, it would be amazing to have conversations and I think every conversation leads to something. I always believe that. And so it may look like what is going on here, but it will lead somewhere. And I love that. So yes, people are more than welcome to reach out to me or our team at Roots. I know that we have some some tentative plans to do some more presenting through the early childhood work in Montana and possibly after Moms Like Me this year, after March 1st. We'd love to come to other communities and just share and just sit how we're doing today and just talking about our experience what we've learned, what our community has learned, what we're dreaming of, and how we can support other communities to do what would work best for them.

Emily: 20:39

Yeah. And sort of right size it for their community, make it a good fit.

Suzanne: 20:43

Absolutely, because that doesn't work. We work in a well-resourced community and not all communities are like Bozeman. And we're very, very aware of that. And I do think that there are lessons that we have learned over the years that another group or another individual could take and adapt to fit exactly what their community needs. Some of our board members are interested in, and I feel like I'm interested in too this bigger vision of Roots. I sometimes feel like every community needs Roots, but it's not necessarily every community needs Roots. Every community needs some organization or several individuals who are continuing to push this forward and continuing to help and support new and expecting and wishful parents. We would love to help support that in any way that we can. And I don't know what that looks like, but I think just starting a conversation and having some questions and I think we would, we'll go from there.

Emily: 21:45

So if someone's listening and you work with an early childhood coalition or even just a group of moms or any community where you think there's a need for it, it sounds like you could probably hop on the phone or Zoom just let them pick your brain about, Hey what would you recommend? How do we get this started?

Suzanne: 22:00

I love that. And, I love talking about Roots I love talking about our story. I love talking about what we do here. I have been in the direct part of our work since the very beginning. I run one of our support groups. I have continued to run and feel in that space alongside other mothers who are in this stage of life. And I love sharing about what we do and I love sharing about how folks can get connected. We've had people call from kind of all over the country that have happened upon Roots on the internet or maybe know a friend who knows about Roots. Roots is maybe my third baby, and so I do like to talk about it. And don't always know the way, and I think that has actually been the best way for Roots. We've always said we're not an organization that's been around for 30 plus years, and we have to do things like exactly this way all of the time. We, we are pretty lucky in that we're a grassRoots organization. We are built from the ground up and we're still learning and we're still uncovering maybe what our bigger mission is. Yeah. So anytime people wanna reach out, we're on the other end. Perfect. Thank you Suzanne.

Emily: 23:20

Well, thank you for this work that you do. It's really important and we'll include a lot of stuff in the show notes. We'll have links to Roots and past videos and recordings of Moms Like Me.

Suzanne: 23:30

Yeah, of course.

Emily Freeman: 23:35

The LIFTS Podcast is a project of Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies The Montana Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the health, safety, and wellbeing of Montana families in the zero to three years of parenting. Visit us at hmhb-mt.org to learn more about who we are and what we do. Views and opinions expressed in these interviews do not necessarily represent HMHB as an organization. If you have feedback on the podcast or an idea for a future guest or episode, we'd love to hear from you. Take our LIFTS podcast listener survey at hmhb-mt.org/survey or email us at stories@hmbmt.org. Thanks for listening.