Born to a first-generation Filipina immigrant mother and African American father, founder Ashlie Magdalena Thompson experienced an upbringing altered by historical and generational burdens.

Thompson says of her own upbringing: “My parents poured so much of themselves into fighting for a foothold in a society built against them. After working long days and nights to provide for our family, sometimes there wasn’t enough energy leftover to pour into our household.”

Homelife made it difficult for Thompson to focus in school, so she struggled academically. Unequipped to pursue college, Thompson left home after graduating high school to enlist in the United States Air Force as a linguist. She studied Pashto, the national language of Afghanistan, at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in Monterey, California, a wonderfully immersive experience that led to an unexpected and valuable discovery of natural linguistic capabilities. However, as her training neared completion, a traumatic incident left Thompson with PTSD, and she separated from the military.

For over a decade thereafter, Thompson dedicated herself to continuing her education while overcoming homelessness, poverty, addiction, and crippling effects of PTSD. Taking college courses when she could, Thompson made slow and arduous progress towards healing, but her growth and determination were rewarded with an opportunity to work as a leasing consultant for an apartment community. She excelled in her field, and while success led to a fervent desire to learn more about property management, the experience also led to an awareness of the industry’s challenges.

Low wages not only kept Thompson from escaping poverty but also were responsible for an industry-wide shortage of quality employees. Determined to investigate, Thompson poured herself into analyzing her own community. Colleagues at neighboring properties opened up about budget cuts that absorbed any possibility of higher wages, and rent hikes made them unable to afford to live in the properties they managed. Those who were able began to leave the industry in droves, and those unable to find other work felt trapped. Thompson was unsettled by the industry’s expendable view of its employees and perplexed by why multimillion-dollar assets were defunding their talent pipeline. Committed to finding a way to break the cycle, Thompson declared Real Estate as her major. She relocated back to Houston in January of 2020, however, just one month into her studies, the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly halted her educational career.

Unable to find work amid Houston’s frozen economy, Thompson and her family fell deeper into poverty. For over a year, she struggled to make ends meet each month, but what she lacked financially she made up for in ambition. Unwilling to fold, Thompson remained devoted to her education. She studied real estate textbooks from her college courses on her own while classes were on hold and used any spare change she had to buy books about multifamily operations and commercial real estate investing.

At the same time, Thompson’s neighborhood underwent concerning changes. Entire blocks of homes were being bought at once, and the number of renters began to exceed the number of homeowners. Other surrounding communities of color were targeted in quick succession, and Thompson’s community soon became overcrowded as rising costs of living resulting from luxury retail and housing developments pushed many Houston natives further from the city. The rate of violent crime tripled.

Searches through county records for answers found that many homes sold recently were bought by out-of-state corporations, and local news outlets had begun reporting that large corporations were increasingly taking advantage of public housing programs to fill rental units.

Most concerning, however, were how these changes were affecting the community’s children. Financial stress detracted from child-rearing, once beautiful homes were now becoming health hazards, and the collective mental, emotional, and spiritual health of the community was rapidly deteriorating as the pandemic continued to put pressure on pre-existing hardships.

Recognizing that her own stress was affecting her parenting decisions, Thompson switched gears. Already majoring in Real Estate, Thompson resumed college and declared a second major in Child Development to understand how decisions made in Houston’s realm of real estate were really impacting the city’s most vulnerable demographic. The program, however, revealed that another vital industry was in complete disarray.

Though many industries were forced to navigate new challenges spurred by the pandemic, the childcare industry was amongst those hit hardest. Thompson’s studies uncovered that, once again, childcare centers in under-served communities suffered disproportionately. Thompson pressed into research on what other countries were doing to resolve issues related to childcare, but she found instead that America ranked second to last in comparison to other developed nations whose governments gave parents extensive support.

It was in this moment that Thompson first questioned whether policy was responsible for her community’s deterioration, and sure enough, Thompson’s quest for answers had reached denouement.

Thompson now saw that the changes within her community were all interconnected by policy. If placed on a spectrum, the current state of her community was the result of two extremes. On one end of the spectrum, Thompson saw firsthand how policies intended to help marginalized communities could severely harm them when left unregulated and under-controlled. On the other end, the lack of vital policies was dooming an entire industry. Both extremes also had lasting negative effects on children, and with an alarming 50 percent of children in Thompson’s county living in low-income households, her concerns intensified in realization that a large portion of the city’s youth were at risk of succumbing to the same generational burdens she experienced throughout her own childhood, especially regarding how they would affect their educational experiences. Thompson responded by taking action.

She began speaking out at Houston’s city council meetings about how federal and state policies were being taken advantage of at the local level. Thompson spoke with the mayor about how multifamily housing projects approved at his discretion were not only creating very few affordable units but were also contributing to many Houstonians being driven from their homes and neighborhoods to escape rising costs of living. Thompson also met with council members of districts with high poverty rates to raise awareness about prioritizing community development efforts amongst members of the districts’ most-afflicted communities. However, when it became clear that city officials weren’t able to share her sense of urgency, Thompson pressed forward once more, determined to help families in her community herself.

And so Leaders Broadening Textual Lineage was born. Thompson’s studies in Child Development led her to specialize in curriculum development, and upon recognizing that children spend more time in school than they sometimes do with their own families, Thompson took great care in advocating for the power art holds in activism to ensure children with upbringings reflective of her own have positive educational experiences. Thompson sought to bring focus to historical change makers of diverse cultural backgrounds, and reignite the joy of self-expression by incorporating music, art, and storytelling into all aspects of learning and policy advocacy.