I am the Executive Director and Co-Founder of CADRE, and therefore have had the blessing of growing this organization from Friday night parent potlucks in a living room on 54th Street and Van Ness in South Central LA starting in 1999, to our office opening in 2001, to where we are today, more than 16 years of parent organizing later. It meant serving first as community organizer, then lead organizer and project director while we were with our fiscal sponsor, and then as the founding Executive Director when we became an independent nonprofit in 2010.

In this role I fundamentally make sure that CADRE is financially stable and sustainable, that we are governed effectively by a board of directors, that we have a staff team that gets to be successful in the work of transformative parent organizing, that we have great allies to partner with and advance a movement behind our work, that the general public knows our story, and above all else, that our parent leaders learn and practice how to guide and grow this organization individually and collectively. Every day that we get to do this work is an achievement.

My single greatest lesson still, after all these years, is that listening to African American and Latino parents be brutally honest about what they face in trying to secure a viable education for their children, and seeing parents first as human beings, is in fact an untapped path towards racial justice. And this is why I am still here – to contribute our lessons learned from parents and unique approach for the world to consider, and in so doing, to fulfill our co-founder Rosalinda Hill’s vision of “a movement of thousands of parents”.

I have been in the social justice movement for 25 years, dedicated to fighting structural racism and oppression through early activism in the mid-1990s and being mentored by numerous Black and Brown activists. Before launching CADRE full-time in August 2001, I was one of three inaugural program managers at Public Allies Los Angeles (PA LA) when it launched in 1999. At PA-LA we trained and coached young adults to serve in their communities with the practices of personal and collective development, an asset-based approach to building and strengthening community leaders, and continuous learning. I spent over six years prior to that as the eventual Associate Director of Los Angeles Partners Advocating Student Success (LA PASS), the local site of a ten-year national Ford Foundation initiative to foster systemic K-16 collaboration and increase college graduation in underserved communities, with most of our work taking place in Watts. I am a proud double Bruin, with a Bachelors of Arts in History and a specialization in Asian American Studies, and a Masters of Arts in Urban Planning from UCLA.

Helping me develop are two professional affiliations. I have the honor of serving as the current Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect of the Board of Directors of the Schott Foundation for Public Education, a national public foundation bridging philanthropy and grassroots advocacy for healthy living and learning climates that support the opportunity to learn in public schools. And as a recent graduate of the Pahara-Aspen Fellowship, I am now a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Institute network.

Because of both parents needing to uproot themselves from their motherlands as a result of war and poverty, I am a native Californian and oldest of three children of Chinese immigrants, the first in my family to be born in the U.S. and navigate a working-class childhood in middle class neighborhoods. The cities of San Diego and San Jose shaped who I am, but I consider Los Angeles the place where I am meant to be. It is here that I get to be an aunt to my beautiful young adult niece. Besides CADRE being my heart and soul, I envision one day being able to write incredible stories that change the shape of how we think about racial justice and liberation.