Leadership development is a lot like gardening. You place people in a nutrient-rich environment, feed the soil, water them, maybe provide a trellis to guide their growth.
For more than 50 years, Solid Ground and our forebear, the Fremont Public Association, have cultivated leaders who have gone on to flourish in anti-poverty organizations, government, academia, and community-building activities across our region and the county.
Neli Jasuja is an alumnus of one of our most intensive leadership development efforts, a decades-long experience tapping into the wellspring of federal funding for VISTA and AmeriCorps programs.
Neli served from October 2017 through August 2018 as an AmeriCorps Nutrition Educator on what we now call the Community Food Education team. She facilitated gardening, cooking, nutrition, and food justice workshops with elementary students in Seattle Public Schools experiencing food insecurity, both in the classroom as well as at Solid Ground’s Giving Garden at Marra Farm in South Park.
And while she was teaching school-aged kids how to grow and prepare food, Neli was growing her own leadership skills as well.
At one time, Solid Ground’s National Service Department housed four distinct AmeriCorps programs, including Apple Corps. In total, we supported up to 160 stipended volunteers a year. In addition to the work they did in their program areas, these folks were given eight hours of leadership training each week.
Neli’s team focused on cooking, gardening, and nutrition education with elementary school students at Leschi, Maple, and Van Asselt elementary schools. In the summer, they hosted elementary school students at the Giving Garden. Other members of the team held cooking and nutrition classes with adults and families and did food bank coalition work.
For Neli, it was a time of watching herself grow.
“I got to witness my own power at Solid Ground. I was given a lot of trust, even though I was new to certain things, and was treated with a lot of respect and encouragement,” she says. “If I was passionate about something, folks at Solid Ground would create space for me to explore it and make it happen.”
For the past five years, Neli has worked at Young Women Empowered (Y-WE), where she is currently the Environmental Justice Programs Manager. “Our mission is to cultivate the power of diverse young women and gender-expansive youth to be creative leaders and changemakers in their communities. It’s very aligned with the work that I got to do with Solid Ground,” Neli says.
“That verb ‘cultivate’ is really important to me and connects back to that idea that the beauty of a seed is that it’s all in the seed. And so every young person is that seed. Every human is that seed.”
Neli recounts her experience facilitating Y-WE’s Environmental Leadership Council back in 2020: “We had to really think about, ‘What is leadership?,’” she says. “And something I really wanted to emphasize with young people is that leadership is often thought of as the loudest voice in the room. The person that wants to stand up and have themselves be heard. We want to celebrate that, but also recognize that’s just one type of leadership.
“And in that discussion, I offered another type of leadership: I brought up the metaphor of mycelium,” she says. “We hear often about mycelium connecting trees in the forest and how they communicate with one another through this network, and also share nutrients and resources.
“That is one type of leadership that I’m drawn to – to be connectors, to empower the rest of the forest, to empower community – recognizing that we’re stronger together when we share resources rather than hoard them. I think that’s a form of leadership that resonates with me,” Neli says.
Watch Neli further discuss her leadership journey in Empowering Young Leaders. You can also watch 50 Years of Cultivating Leadership to learn more about other community leaders supported by their experience at Solid Ground.
- Image at top: Video still of Neli Jasuja (video by Tim Hamp)
- Other images courtesy of Young Women Empowered
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