About the Founder

Marissa Jackson

If believing in yourself can change what feels possible, what becomes possible when whole communities believe in their own power?

While studying Urban Studies and History at Columbia University, Marissa worked as a research assistant in New York City classrooms and after-school programs on Carol Dweck and Lisa Blackwell’s longitudinal study, research that would come to be known as 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. Marissa’s mission to mobilize whole communities that believe in their own power has guided her path from classrooms to community spaces, toward projects that help people work together to create something bigger, deeper, and more meaningful than what they believe they could do alone.

Through her Master of Social Work at Rutgers University, Marissa gained a person-in-environment framework and a deep commitment to macro practice that gave her the language for what she had already been observing. Over two decades, Marissa has dedicated her work to belonging and care within K-12 and higher education, community-based programming and nonprofit administration, ed-tech, and telehealth settings. 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 true belonging and growth.