SEED AND STRUCTURE
building durability from the inside out
About Jamila Medley
Jamila Medley is a relationship weaver, culture worker, and artist working at the intersections of the personal and organizational. Alongside those she works with, Jamila cocreates and curates what is needed to experience systemic durability in the most important parts of our lives. She does this through writing, maintaining an organizational development consultancy, and curating the Black Women at Home Project (BW@H). Jamila’s work is a commitment to ensuring that the structures we build and the spaces we inhabit serve as sites of liberation, resilience, and care.
For over 25 years, Jamila has supported start-ups, non-profits, foundations, and cooperatives through emergent and designed change. Her consulting work helps groups operationalize their values through participatory governance, strategic planning, qualitative research, and leadership development.
In 2023, Jamila began complementing her work in systemic transformation with a cultural archive project focused on visibilizing the ways Black women embody and celebrate home as a site of sacred wellness and liberation. She calls this the Black Women at Home Project.
Since 2021, Jamila has played several key roles at the intersections of philanthropy, solidarity economy building, and the nonprofit sector. At The Partnership Fund, she stewards the Collective Courage Fund, supporting Black-led food and land cooperatives. As part of Solidarity Resource—a multi-racial collaborative of co-op developers, educators, and labor organizers—Jamila has contributed to building the essential tools cooperatives need to launch with intentionality. She has also been a collaborator on the Solidarity Economy Principles Project and Securing the Roots. Currently, she serves as the Board Chair of the People's Media Fund and on the board of directors for the Food Co-op Initiative.
From 2012–2021, Jamila served as a founding board member and then as the Executive Director of the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance (PACA), positioning cooperative enterprises as robust solutions to racial and economic injustice.
In 2026, Jamila is launching Seed and Structure, a framework and a way of being that weaves personal wholeness into collective strength—so our lives and our structures finally tell the same story. More soon!
A native of Brooklyn, NY, Jamila has called Philadelphia, PA home for 15 years. She is a mama and a Mimi with a partner who supports and helps make her wildest dreams come true. And Jamila holds an M.S. in Organizational Dynamics from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in Urban Studies from Connecticut College.