Seattle: Dr. Ben Danielson Won a Racial Discrimination Case. Now He's Fighting Youth Incarceration. [View all]

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https://southseattleemerald.org/community/2025/10/20/dr-ben-danielson-won-a-racial-discrimination-case-now-hes-fighting-youth-incarceration

Dr. Ben Danielson Won a Racial Discrimination Case. Now He's Fighting Youth Incarceration.

Sarah Goh
Published on:
Oct 20, 2025, 11:49 am

Dr. Ben Danielson is no stranger to standing up against unjust systems.

Well-known for his lawsuit of racial discrimination against Seattle Children's Hospital, Danielson, a pediatric physician and former South Seattle medical director of Seattle Children's Odessa Brown Children's Clinic, resigned in 2020 from the hospital. He later successfully won his case, proving the racially hostile work environment he had endured.

Since then, Danielson has branched into tackling health care problems outside the hospital, approaching health care more systemically. One of his efforts is the Allies in Healthier Systems for Health and Abundance in Youth (ASHAY), which began under the community sponsorship of the South Seattle Tubman Center for Health and Freedom.

ASHAY's mission is to deconstruct harmful institutions like youth incarceration, and instead build up fortifiers of health and hope for the youth.

"As a pediatrician," Danielson says, "there's a role that we should be playing in supporting young people and a need for us to transparently see what happens when we make the choice to incarcerate a young person."

ASHAY has worked on multiple projects and collaborations since 2021, many of them based in South Seattle. In 2024, they helped facilitate a gun violence documentary at Garfield High School. After another horrific gun violence death, Garfield high schoolers wanted to create a documentary to process what they had been through. ASHAY was able to invite a filmmaker to help bring this project to life.

"They had a specific desire to not just wallow in the deepest negatives of having experienced gun violence, but also wanted to name that they were still young people celebrating going through an experience of life like high school," Danielson says, "They wanted to re-instill a sense of spirit in their school."

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