Teachers are our Future
As a preschool teacher while I was still in high school, realized very quickly that teachers are our front line... absorbing the immediate impact of poverty, instability, underinvestment, and policy decisions made far away from the classroom.
Working with very young children means you see trajectories early. You see how housing instability shows up as exhaustion. How food insecurity affects attention and behavior. How lack of healthcare, childcare gaps, transportation barriers, and parental stress all arrive in the room each morning. None of those problems originate in the classroom, but teachers are expected to manage their consequences.
I realized that no amount of individual dedication could compensate for structural scarcity. Our lead teacher quit, and her replacement was there only a few weeks before she warned me "you don't want to do this." And quit. I was offered a assistant manager position in corporate housing when I graduated and it was a no brainer.
When I got to college and began studying the social determinants of health, public policy, and social justice, it gave language and structure to what I had already witnessed. The research did not feel abstract; it felt explanatory. It confirmed that what shows up in a classroom is rarely a "school problem." It is the cumulative effect of housing, healthcare access, transportation, income stability, environmental conditions, and public investment - or the lack of it.
That realization shifted my trajectory upstream, into work focused on systems, strategy, and collaboration across sectors. My role is rarely to be the loudest voice in the room. It's to help design the room itself: who is invited, what information is present, what constraints are acknowledged, and what kinds of solutions can realistically emerge. Structure shapes outcomes long before any vote or announcement does.
People need spaces where disagreement is possible without collapse, where uncertainty can be examined rather than hidden, and where ideas can be tested without becoming positions too quickly.
Through my work in events strategy I've helped to curate rooms where huge strides of progress have been made, throughout all sectors. That's no small feat, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to help those who carry the work forward.
