EARLY LIFE

From Lived Experience to Structural Change

I have loved Multnomah County since the day I arrived. Moving here to attend Lewis & Clark College was a massive leap for an 18-year-old from a working-class family who had never even been on an airplane. Forty years later, I cannot imagine living or fighting anywhere else.

My path to public service started with my own family’s struggle. My father was a bus driver, and my mother stayed at home until my parents divorced, upending our lives. My mom, an immigrant from Mexico without a formal education, fought tirelessly to keep us kids together, fed, and clothed. Anti-poverty programs opened just enough of a door for her to earn her GED and an associate's degree in dental assisting while I was in high school. But the process was broken. I watched her struggle to navigate systems that were never built for her, and standing in those assistance lines with her as a child, I felt the quiet shame that people in need are so often made to feel. That experience never left me. It is the reason why treating people who turn to public services with absolute dignity matters to me just as much as the policies we write.

Sharpening the Tools for Reform

After graduating from college, I put those values to work as an academic advisor at Portland Community College’s Cascade Campus right here in North Portland. On the ground, I saw how policy directly impacted lives. I worked alongside women in Oregon’s first welfare-reform programs—some who secured the structural support they needed to earn family-wage careers, and others who were prematurely pushed back into precarious, low-wage work. I met bright Jefferson High School graduates who held excellent grades but quickly discovered their high school education hadn't fully prepared them for college coursework.

Those foundational experiences sharpened my conviction that simply managing individual crises wasn't enough. If we wanted working families to build stable lives, the overarching policies themselves had to change.

To make structural policy change my lifelong vocation, I spent four years earning concurrent graduate degrees: a Master in Public Policy (MPP) from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a Juris Doctor (JD) from the UC Berkeley School of Law. Equipped with deep legal, financial, and administrative tools, I returned home to Portland and took a job with Portland City Commissioner Erik Sten, ready to dismantle barriers and deliver a local government that reliably works for our neighborhoods.