Rooted to Rise: On Identity, Belonging, and the Fire that Sustains
What does it look like when an organization doesn’t just talk about values — but builds them into the very bones of how it works? This month’s episode offers a powerful, living answer to that question.
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“The fire is what carries you forward. But it’s the care and the grace that sustains you.”
AsaleSol Young, Executive Director of Housing and Action, came into leadership with a clear vision: to build a truly anti-racist organization where people could show up whole — fully seen, embraced, safe — and stay in that work for the long haul. They brought the fire of a lifelong activist to their work, but fire without grounding can flame out. Rather than navigate the transition alone, they turned to Elder Atum Azzahir, founder of the Cultural Wellness Center, and someone they had known and trusted for years. What AsaleSol found in Elder Atum was an elder with deep ancestral knowledge who could hold all of who they are and reflect it back with radical acceptance. That kind of holding doesn’t put the fire out. It lets the light spread.
“It goes from walking kind of for people or on behalf of people to walking alongside.”
When every part of you is fully embraced something opens up. The vision, the ideas, the creative solutions can come forward freely and safely. Moving from that grounded place, AsaleSol began bringing others along: the board, the leadership team, then the full staff. What grew wasn’t just a strategic transformation but the building of a shared consciousness. Staying grounded in cultural identity helped AsaleSol and Housing in Action create a collective sense of who they were as an organization, and what it means to both take up space as individuals and hold each other to doing it in a connected, rooted way, so that they could build together, as a community.
“Individualism, loss of culture, and loss of community will and does make you sick.”
Elder Atum has spent 30 years building the Cultural Wellness Center around a truth that is both ancient and urgently needed: that people cannot do their best work when they are cut off from their cultural roots and from one another. The center’s approach, grounded in ancient and indigenous teaching traditions, centers what Elder Atum calls memory healing, helping individuals trace what’s at the root of their exhaustion, disconnection, or struggle, and reconnect to purpose and community. That understanding is the foundation of self-determination. It also helps you see clearly that you no longer have to carry the hard things as your own, or on your own. That is a wellness rooted in ancestry and history that sustains resistance.
This is a conversation for anyone in human services who has felt the tension between urgency and sustainability, between fighting hard and lasting long. AsaleSol and Elder Atum offer something rare: a living model of what it looks like when cultural grounding, healing, and organizational development aren’t separate endeavors — but one and the same.