About Me.

I am a mama to six amazing human beings who love the Bay Area as much as I do. I have lived in Oakland for more than 22 years and am so honored to have raised my family here alongside my husband.

I believe deeply in community and know that a world that honors everyone’s humanity is possible. I have been deeply influenced and shaped by my family’s Indigenous, Mexican, and Filipino heritage and by our San Francisco working-class roots of my dad and his father and my mom’s small-town rural upbringing in Healdsburg, CA, where she, her siblings, and parents were farm workers and activist.

After 30 years of working as an advocate and in non-profit leadership, I transitioned into philanthropy. I am always a community organizer, humbled and honored that I am still asked to sit at tables as an observer and sometimes adviser to change.

As a Senior Program Officer, I support my foundation by recommending groups who are making an investments in criminal and juvenile justice movement building. Prior to my time in philanthropy, I served as the Western & Southern Regional Program Manager at the W. Haywood Burns Institute from 2005-2010 and co-managed the Community Justice Network for Youth (CJNY)a national network of over 140 organizations that work to reduce racial disparities in the juvenile justice system. I was a member of the leadership team at the Young Women’s Freedom Center from 2017-2020. YWFC is where I began my journey in community work as a youth more than 30 years ago. I briefly left the field of criminal/juvenile justice to become a social justice/civic engagement teacher and Dean of Students at an independent Oakland charter school. I am a founding member of the Sister Warriors Freedom Coalition, a 2022-2024 Leading Edge Fellow and the recipient of the 2015 Teachers for Social Justice Award.