About the Founder
Marissa Jackson, MSW
Marissa's path to this work began with a question she has been asking ever since: how do the systems around young people shape who they believe they can become?
As an undergraduate studying Urban Studies at Columbia University, she spent three years in New York City classrooms and after-school programs providing in-class and after-school support to a cohort of adolescent girls as part of Carol Dweck and Lisa Blackwell’s longitudinal research, which would become the foundation of what the world now knows as the growth mindset. Watching rigorous inquiry reveal how belief, environment, and opportunity intersect to shape a young person's sense of what is possible was an early and defining experience.
It carried her through a Master of Social Work at Rutgers University, where a person-in-environment framework and a deep commitment to macro practice gave her the language for what she had already been observing, and into a range of settings where the systems she had studied became the communities she served. This lens on the systems shaping students’ and families’ lives both inside and outside the school building laid a foundation for Marissa’s professional experiences in K-12 schools as a classroom teacher, school social worker, and Director of School Climate before moving into higher education as a leader in student success, transitional programming, and family engagement; and into nonprofit and private settings that expanded her understanding of what it can look like to show up as a community for people in the full complexity of their circumstances.
Ahali has emerged from this deep, practiced understanding of how communities work: how they hold people, how they shape them, and what it takes to build the conditions for genuine belonging and growth.