A leader of Seattle-based Hummingbird Indigenous Family Services has joined the prestigious ranks of the Aspen Institute’s Ascend Fellowship this year. Tess Abrahamson-Richards, MPH, Hummingbird’s director of data sovereignty, is one of 22 early childhood services leaders from across the country who will work together to tackle a wide range of issues impacting children and families, including:
- Ensuring new parents, children, and their families have access to mental and behavioral health services,
- Expanding access to early care and education in rural and immigrant communities and investing in the early childhood workforce across the country,
- Applying lessons from Indigenous communities to home visiting and well-being across the lifespan,
- Building family stability to help keep families together and children out of the child welfare system and
- Expanding guaranteed income and other sources of capital so families can determine their own paths.
Abrahamson-Richards said this month that she is enormously honored by the appointment.
“I was surprised to hear I was nominated and received the initial invitation to apply,” Abrahamson-Richards said in an email interview with Seattle’s Child. “I know how many incredible people have been Fellows in the past (like Senator Raphael Warnock), so it was simultaneously very shocking, humbling, and exciting. I work alongside so many other amazing Indigenous birth justice warriors, and all of them would have been so deserving of this, too, so it’s important to me to utilize this experience to bring something back to that community.”
Turning big ideas into action
The 2024 group is the second class of Ascend Fellows to focus primarily on leaders working in the early childhood space. Each new fellow brings one “big idea” to the group, and together, the cohort works to turn each idea into action.
“Reaching children and their families in their earliest years is vital to building intergenerational prosperity and well-being,” said Anne Mosle, vice president of the Aspen Institute and founder and executive director of Ascend. “I’m inspired by the commitment of these 22 leaders to transform the systems that our young children and their families experience. By embracing the power of change capital – financial, intellectual, human, and social capital – they are making the world work for children and families.”
Abrahamson-Richards described the big idea she will bring to the table this way: “I envision a future of maternal and child health policy and data that is able to offer true equity, justice, and sovereignty to Indigenous communities in the United States.”
“The history of colonization our communities and people have experienced has very often targeted our ability to raise and nurture our children within our cultural best practices, or to raise them at all,” Abrahamson-Richards said, pointing to Native American and Native Hawaiian Boarding School systems, forced sterilizations of Indigenous and Black mothers in the 1960s and 70s, and the disproportionate rates of child welfare removals that continue today as tools of that colonization.
“As we look towards opportunities to promote Indigenous family well-being now and into the future, we need to address the root causes of current health and social inequities,” she said. “Our communities deserve to have equal power in determining what kinds of programs and services are eligible for funding, what kinds of data are collected and how, and to have our cultural and community strengths celebrated at the level of programming and data. Often, this isn’t the case because we are left out of data and policy conversations and because funding-eligible early childhood interventions are nearly exclusively those that have been developed and tested in non-Indigenous settings using non-Indigenous scientific methodologies. Lots of good work is happening to change this, and I and Hummingbird Indigenous Family Services are very excited to be leaders and community builders in that space.”
If Tessa Abrahamson-Richards big idea becomes reality
Like her role at Hummingbird, Abrahamson-Richards big idea is rooted in data.
“Both Tribally-based and urban Indigenous organizations like Hummingbird experience constraints on being responsive to the services our communities are asking for based on what is fundable and what other resources (like data) are available,” she explained. “The more we can exercise sovereignty in these areas, the more we will see our young families thriving.
She points out that Indigenous communities have a lot of evidence to contribute to the wider field of child welfare.
“Indigenous scientific methodologies are brilliant and have promoted the holistic well-being of people and the environment on this continent for millennia,” Abrahamson-Richards said. “Western science is brilliant too, but it isn’t perfect, so utilizing multiple diverse knowledge systems can only benefit us. And when it comes to Indigenous communities, our wisdom should be centered.”
A leader in Indigenous early childhood
Abrahamson-Richards is a citizen of the Spokane Tribe and lives in Seattle. A mother of two, Abrahamson-Richards is pursuing a doctorate in social welfare at the University of Washington, where her research focuses on Indigenous reproductive justice, holistic family well-being, and access to parental leave. Before she joined Hummingbird, she spent 12 years working in Indigenous evaluation and research roles in university and private sector settings. In those positions, she served on the leadership team of a multisite assessment of Tribal early childhood home visiting programs. She led and contributed to a variety of other Indigenous early childhood, higher education, and public health-focused projects.
In her Hummingbird bio, Abrahamson-Richards is described as “passionate about evaluation that centers participants’ voices, Indigenous methods, community action, stories, and strengths.” That passion was inspired by her own childhood:
“I was raised by a phenomenal Indigenous mother (we are citizens of the Spokane Tribe) with a strong voice for leadership and justice,” Abrahamson-Richards said. “Her care for us and the communities she has worked in has always been my biggest source of inspiration. In addition to that, I have worked in Indigenous early childhood settings for the past 17 years, and the community-based brilliance and beauty I see is a big inspiration. I don’t do my work alone and am surrounded by the most amazing colleagues, families, and kiddos.”
Birth care and early support for Indigenous families
Hummingbird Indigenous Family Services was founded in 2019 to provide birth doula and other support services to Indigenous families in Puget Sound. The organization offers several programs:
- BirthKeepers is a culturally responsive, full spectrum, Indigenous doula program providing free-of-cost services to pregnant people who identify as American Indian/Alaska Native/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (AI/AN/NH/PI) living in King, Pierce and South Snohomish County.
- The Pilimakua Family Connections Program provides Indigenous-centered services to support physical, social-emotional, cognitive, and cultural health.
- The Nest program includes piloting the first guaranteed income program to exclusively serve Indigenous communities in the United States.
- This Storytelling Documentary Series shares narratives by and for Indigenous parents and birthing people.
- The organization delivers rapid response abortion care funding to support Indigenous peoples living in rural Washington and neighboring states where abortion is no longer accessible.
The Aspen Institute Ascend Fellowship’s new cohort brings the number of fellows since the advent of the program to 162. According to the institute, fellows are among “the most promising leaders our country has to offer—leaders well-connected, well-prepared, and powerfully positioned to build the political will, change systems, and drive the policy agenda needed for the prosperity and well-being of all children and families.”
The Aspen Institute is a worldwide nonprofit dedicated to building a “just, free, and equitable society.” It is renowned for bringing together diverse, nonpartisan thought leaders, creatives, scholars, and community members to grapple with the world’s most complex problems. According to the organization’s mission statement: “The goal of these convenings is to have an impact beyond the conference room. They are designed to provoke, further, and improve actions taken in the real world.”
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