Biography

I have always been sensitive to the needs of others, I believe because I was expected to help raise my siblings and because I watched my mother struggle on a secretary's salary. Though I lacked the language to express it at the time, I was also formulating a social consciousness and understood that it was the existence of unjust political systems that made it difficult, if not impossible, for my family, and many others like ours, to move beyond the economic situations to which we were born.

When I entered a liberal arts college in upstate New York, I participated in and helped organize discussions and events that asked youth what they were willing to do to change the world. The more I learned of the world's social ills, the more I understood that education was a solution. My service to others began when I mentored second graders for an international student organization called P.E.A.C.E., which based its programming on raising awareness of social justice issues via alternative education. By my junior year, I was a classroom coordinator and a member of the board and was elected chairwomam in my senior year. Simultaneously, I served as a writing intern for the academic resource center. I saw that cultivating effective writing techniques was a necessary skill that students from all economic backgrounds lacked.

After college I was a coordinator for two Bronx-based community centers in New York. Through these organizations I helped design, implement, and establish opportunities for the creation of alternative and complimentary education programs such as ESL and GED, but also much needed services such as free after school care with homework help components. I also undertook valuable programs in danger of being cut because the organizations could not afford to pay for staffing. It was then that I began noticing many of our participants were lacking the skills they needed to succeed academicaly. I decided that I neeed to be more directly involved with the school system. In June of 2006 I began a teaching program and worked for one semester in a high-needs high school in Queens. Although I was doing good work there, something was missing: it became more imperative that I return to my home state.

I am currently the program educator for girltime, a non-profit program devoted to empowering middle school girls in Taos County to make conscious and responsible decisions surrounding issues that effect youth. Through activities, discussion, and field trips I introduce participants to the possibilities awaiting them and the responsibilties they share with all of humanity to create a world that provides for all. Now, it's my turn to ask of them, "What are you willing to do to change the world?" It's such a lucky position, I find myself in.