Candidate for
Director; Manila Community Services District

Manila is already a beautiful place to live and love. My hope is that my vision of democratic process can improve the work we do here together.

I like to say that I believe in radical democracy. Democratic process is not an easy path. It is laborious, it is often contentious, and it is sometimes disappointing. One must understand that in a democracy, things may not always go the way one hopes. And the best one can hope for is that everyone participates with the best of intentions and a high level of integrity. As cynical as we may be about our national political condition, I believe that at the local level, we can still have a significant effect.

I learned about democracy when I visited Nicaragua in the 1980s. There I realized the great opportunity that we have here to participate in our own governance, which so few of us actually take advantage of, and I returned to the US resolved to be active in my own community. My activism led me to go back to school and get a bachelor's degree in 1990 at Queens College, City University of New York, and I went to UCLA for graduate work, where I researched the effects of transnational migration between Ecuador and New York City.

I conducted a needs assessment there in a small rural community, and when I returned to Los Angeles to complete my master's degree, I joined a team of researchers to conduct a needs assessment in an immigrant community in downtown L.A. I see the needs assessment as a collective way of imagining the future of a community, but also it is a method of organizing citizens as you meet each other, discuss the process, consider the possibilities, and build a collective notion of what we might achieve together. Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator who won international awards for his literacy projects, used to say that we make the road by walking, and I have found this to be true.

I came to southern Humboldt in 2003 and I began working with the Environmental Protection Information Center where I came to understand the particular culture and history of this special region. In 2008 I moved to my current home and began working with CASA of Humboldt, where I supervise volunteers from all over the county who work with children caught up in the child welfare system.