Different vantage points on the same questions.
The places I've worked may look eclectic at first glance. To me, they are different vantage points on many of the same questions: How do people find their way through complicated systems? What makes a community work? Who is being heard? What is getting lost between people and institutions? What becomes possible when people who need one another are connected?
Each experience changed what I could see in the next one. Together, they shape how I work, how I see the larger world, and what I envision for the future.
Where it started
I was born and raised in San Diego. Some of my earliest memories are of community action with my family: protecting local beaches, gathering food and clothing for unhoused people, showing up for people who were being treated unfairly.
When I was about four, an older cousin made me a protest sign while we were sitting at the table in my grandma's RV parked at the beach: "Hey you, SOB! SAVE OUR BEACHES." I don't claim I became a community organizer at four. But I absorbed important lessons early on, including this one: when something matters, ordinary people can decide to show up, and that can change the outcome.
During an internship at the Children's Defense Fund, I heard a story about a father whose son had been killed in a drive-by shooting. He had done everything "right" — worked hard to afford a house in a good neighborhood so his kids could go to good schools, coached their sports teams, volunteered at their schools. His friends did not understand why he kept saying "I didn't do enough," over and over again. Finally, he told them his question was about the other boy, the one who killed his son. He had not thought about that boy. About whether he had a safe place to live, a good school to go to, meaningful activities after school, or people in his corner.
A story that stayed with me
That story has stuck with me for decades. We are all responsible for and to each other.
What each chapter taught me
The settings have changed. The through-line hasn't: people are more resilient, more creative, and more able to act and persist when they know they aren't doing it alone. Much of my work has been about building the community, relationships, and conditions that make it possible for people to do together what is harder to do alone.
Research, health policy and advocacy | UC San Diego
At UC San Diego, I moved between research, teaching, health policy, advocacy, and direct work with patients and families. I learned early that the same system looks very different depending on where you are standing, and that good policy has to stay connected to the people whose lives it is meant to improve.
Special education teaching and case management | San Diego Unified School District
Teaching made the stakes of systems immediate and personal. I learned that most people are carrying more than meets the eye, that trust and respect have to come before real learning can happen, and that helping someone experience even small success tends to create more of it. Case management taught me to work alongside families navigating complicated systems for deeply personal matters, and to advocate when what was best for the system was not what was best for the child.
Fitness, nutrition and entrepreneurship | New You Fitness
Running my own fitness and nutrition business taught me to meet people where they were and help them get to where they wanted to be. It also reinforced my belief in community. Health and healing happen in community. Most people won't get up at 5:30am on a winter morning to work out outside just for the exercise.
Technology and neighborhood building | Nextdoor
At Nextdoor I learned that the principles behind good community organizing work just as well for a technology platform. The platform could connect neighbors, but technology alone could not create trust or a sense of shared responsibility. That came from relationships: with residents, neighborhood leaders, community organizations, and local institutions. Technology usually divides us. It delivers what is happening far away and misses what is happening next door. At its best, it does the opposite: it makes the first contact possible, then gets out of the way so real connection can take root.
Civic, political and electoral organizing | Indivisible San Diego
Organizing through Indivisible showed me how quickly people can go from feeling powerless and alone to making a real difference when they find one another and hold onto hope. I learned that leadership looks different depending on what is needed. Sometimes the most important thing you can do is show up and stand quietly behind someone with a sign in your hand.
Humanitarian response | Emergency asylum-seeker shelter
Helping to stand up emergency shelters for asylum seekers taught me what it means to build something while vulnerable people are already depending on what you are building. Systems cannot be perfected before they are needed. Conditions changed constantly. We had to listen to each other and to the people we were serving, decide, and adapt in real time.
I also learned something from the people we were serving: resilience and grit know no boundaries. I worried about putting mothers and children who spoke no English or Spanish on cross-country buses to reach their final destinations. I was reminded that the bus ride, no matter how long, would be nothing compared to what they had already survived.
Statewide community infrastructure and outreach | Social Bridging Project
Creating the Social Bridging Project brought many of the lessons I had already learned together at statewide scale. We were building something that had never existed while the pandemic and emergencies like wildfires kept changing what people needed from us. Our goal was not simply to place more calls. It was to create the conditions for meaningful conversations, then keep learning from those conversations and refining the system around what we heard.
Caregiving
Alongside much of my professional work, I spent more than thirty years as a family caregiver. It shaped the choices available to me and gave me another perspective on institutions, fragmented systems, and advocacy. And on the difference it makes to have someone in your corner who is paying attention and making sure nothing gets missed.
Each setting supplied something the others could not
I would not have built what I built at the Social Bridging Project without having been a teacher, an organizer, a researcher, and a caregiver first.
Lived experience alongside institutional work. Frontline alongside strategic. Visible alongside behind the scenes.
That combination gives me a perspective that is difficult to come by any other way.