Hummingbird Indigenous Family Services launched in 2019 with the mission of healthy Indigenous babies being born into healthy Indigenous families being supported by healthy Indigenous communities. Elisha Sneddy, Pathwaves Fellow at Hummingbird, and her supervisor Camie Goldhammer, Founding Executive Director, share about their work and vision for expanding policy impact in Washington state.
The relationship between Elisha and Hummingbird began several years ago, on the other side of the country. Elisha was working in Washington, DC and attended a presentation that Camie was giving on reproductive justice and birth equity. They remained connected and Camie reached out to Elisha about the Pathwaves Fellowship when the partnership with Hummingbird was formed.
Camie recalls, “We had a pretty major capacity challenge. Policy advocacy was a gap in the work that we were doing at Hummingbird. We are very direct service oriented, so having the opportunity to focus on policy that impacts our communities is something that we wanted to prioritize.” Partnership with Pathwaves was the perfect opportunity to build capacity for policy advocacy within Hummingbird while also prioritizing the development of an Indigenous leader. Camie continues, “I really believe in Native people doing this work for our community. I believe strongly that we are the answer and any opportunity to be a part of Native people getting more knowledge, skills, and experience is worthwhile to me. We are the ‘I’ in BIPOC. I am glad there are folks developing leadership for the other communities represented in the acronym, but I am really about the ‘I’.”
Elisha remembers exactly where she was when Camie told her about the Pathwaves Fellowship. She was having lunch at Chili’s in Albuquerque, New Mexico after attending a maternal health conference when she got the call suggesting she apply for the Fellowship. At the time, Elisha was two years into leading maternal and child health programs at the national level in DC, yet she was missing the deep community connections Through their previous connection, Elisha was already inspired by the work that Camie was doing at Hummingbird. But this was the first time she had heard about a program like Pathwaves and she was immediately drawn to the Fellowship’s focus on collective liberation, antiracist leadership, and partnerships with organizations like Hummingbird. Following the application process, Elisha made the cross-country move to Seattle to join their team and Pathwaves’ second Fellowship cohort. She shares, “The stars aligned, and I would say the rest is history but it is actually still being written.”
Central to Elisha’s work at Hummingbird is centering Indigenous people in everything that they do. Elisha explains, “Our work at Hummingbird is very rooted in our Indigenous values and knowledge systems. Camie always reminds us that our answers come from within our communities. Reclaiming birthing practices or creating coalitions that make space for us to develop policies that meet our needs is essential to our work.” This is how Elisha approaches every aspect of her role, from professional development activities at Pathwaves to upcoming projects at Hummingbird including: focusing on advancing policies that support Indigenous families, supporting the guaranteed basic income initiative, leading a community of practice for Indigenous people involved in maternal mortality reviews, and making connections with reproductive justice organizations to increase abortion access in Native communities.
As she continues to develop her leadership and advocacy skills within the policy space, Elisha remains focused on centering her community, “I come from generations of powerful matriarchs in my family. Working at an organization that values our traditional way of life means so much to me. I am still working to earn my title at Hummingbird of ‘Policy Auntie’. It’s sacred work and it’s heart work.”
