Community Care Isn't Optional: Lessons from Ashma Berkel
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
There's a version of community care that looks like charity — giving back once you've made it, from a comfortable distance. Ashma Berkel isn't interested in that version.
As the Founder and Director of Leaders for Change, Ashma has spent her career building the kind of community infrastructure that doesn't wait for someone to arrive and save the day. In Episode 2 of BABA: Becoming a Better Ancestor, she breaks down what community care actually looks like when it's done well — and why it's one of the most sophisticated forms of leadership there is.
Care as strategy, not sentiment
Ashma's perspective reframes community care from a nice-to-have into a core competency. The communities that thrive long-term aren't the ones that produced the most successful individuals — they're the ones where those individuals turned around and invested back in the systems that shaped them.
For Caribbean communities, this is both urgent and complicated. The diaspora is spread across continents. Resources are thin. The needs are real and layered. What Ashma offers is a way of thinking about care that is strategic — not just compassionate, but designed to actually work.
What "Leaders for Change" means in practice
Ashma's organization isn't just a name. It's a model: leaders who change things, and change themselves in the process of leading. Her work centers the idea that effective community leadership requires the same rigor and intentionality that we'd apply to any other professional discipline.
That means assessing needs honestly. Building relationships before you need them. Accepting that community care is long work, not sprint work. And staying in it even when the results aren't visible yet.
Why BABA opened with this
BABA: Becoming a Better Ancestor is a series about how Caribbean and diaspora leaders build lives and communities worth inheriting. Community care isn't a bonus episode — it's central to the whole project. Ashma's conversation sets a framework for everything that follows: that becoming a better ancestor means actively building the conditions for future generations to thrive, not just leaving them money.
Watch Episode 2 on YouTube:
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