About Asha
[Pronouns: she/ her/ hers] 

Asha is a project director at CompassPoint with extensive experience in equity-based leadership, facilitation, and community building.  Over the past two decades, she has worked with hundreds of nonprofit organizations and schools in the Bay Area and beyond.  She started her career at Cesar Chavez Elementary School in San Francisco where the godmothers of the Mission, as she calls them, inspired her vision of leadership as something collective, loving, fierce, and deeply rooted in community traditions. These early professional experiences ignited her entire career as a community school coordinator, high school teacher, youth empowerment program director, evaluator, grantwriter, executive director, and capacity builder. 

Prior to joining CompassPoint, Asha was the associate program director at LeaderSpring where she designed and facilitated leadership development programs for The California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities Initiative and the Oakland Museum of California. She also spent six years as the executive director of the San Francisco Beacon Initiative, strengthening school-based community centers in 17 public schools serving 10,000 participants annually. Other organizations she has worked at include: Community Network for Youth Development, Community Educational Services, Hatchuel, Tabernik, & Associates, and Alternatives in Action.  She received her Master’s Degree in Education from Stanford University with an emphasis in Language, Literacy, and Culture.  She loves to spend time listening to music with her son, reading, and swimming.  She secretly dreams of being a standup comic one day.