🌱 Rooted Futures: Welcoming the 2025 Youth Leadership Cohorts

September 8, 2025

Nearly a century ago, Arvilla Snow-Redfern turned her grief into purpose. From the heartbreak of losing her son, Monte, she cultivated something wildly generative—a foundation committed to nurturing young lives. What began as a home for boys has composted, sprouted, and stretched into something bigger: a network of programs and partnerships designed to uplift youth across Nebraska. Rooted in relationship. Rising in resilience.

This fall, we carry that legacy forward by welcoming two powerful cohorts into our youth leadership programs: Root2Rise and Young Men Rising.

🌸 Root2Rise: Growing Bold, Rooted, and Unapologetically Whole

Root2Rise is not your average leadership training. It is a spiral. A listening practice. A space where young women don’t just learn skills—they remember who they are in community, in complexity, and in the larger web of life.

At the helm is Dr. Maya Chilese, a luminous force and organizational ecosystem weaver whose work has reshaped our very bones. Maya doesn’t facilitate from the front—she listens, invites, midwifes, and co-weaves. She has nurtured Root2Rise from a seed of intention into a relational greenhouse of growth.

We are thrilled to welcome this year’s Root2Rise cohort:

  • Ashlynn Collins, Bridgeport

  • Libby Sorensen, Hemingford

  • Kennedy Hobson, Sidney

  • Jezrelle Munyiri, Chadron

  • Mattie Taylor, Mitchell

Together, these five young women are stepping into their leadership not through competition, but through connection. Not through perfection, but through presence. Through the art of rooting down in order to rise up.

🌿 Young Men Rising: A New Chapter Begins

This is the inaugural year of Young Men Rising, a program born from our desire to expand Arvilla’s early vision with nuance, care, and updated rhythm. These times call for a new kind of leadership among young men—one that honors vulnerability, relational responsibility, and courage as relational acts, not performance metrics.

Enter Jesse Davy. A systems-thinker and long-term youth mentor with a background in epidemiology and fatherhood, Jesse brings a quiet brilliance to this work. His curriculum for Young Men Rising rejects dominance and invites curiosity. The focus? Purpose without posturing. Courage without conquest.

We are proud to introduce our first-ever Young Men Rising cohort:

  • Hutchinson Vacek, Hebron

  • Keaton Gilsdorf, Bloomfield

  • Giovani Alvarado, South Sioux City

  • Brody Gustafson, Scottsbluff

These young men are not just here to lead. They’re here to listen, to unlearn, to ask better questions, and to rise—not above others, but beside them.

🌀 These Programs Are Not Solutions—They Are Seeds

Root2Rise and Young Men Rising are not designed to produce polished “leaders.” They are invitations into complexity. Into relationships that ripple. Into futures that can’t be mapped but must be tended.

Together, these programs embody our meta-relational commitment: to stay in the field of emergence, compost extractive logic, and co-create from the ground of mutual care.

So here we are. Rooted in Arvilla’s legacy. Rising with our youth. Grateful for the facilitators who lead with presence. And ready to walk, together, into what’s still becoming.

Join us.

To learn more or support this work:
👉 www.snowredfern.org