The work I’m proudest of isn’t a bill number. It’s the advocates: the teacher whose work on our school meals campaign led to a teacher-of-the-year nomination, and the parents and workers who found out that three minutes of testimony from someone living the problem carries further than anything I can say. Finding those people, preparing them, and putting them in front of a committee is the part of this job I am best at.
I got here by an indirect route. I taught high school business and math for more than five years, which is where I learned to explain a complicated thing simply — still the most useful skill I have. Then I spent seven years in mortgage lending, sitting across from families who were doing everything right, working full time and budgeting carefully, and still couldn’t make the numbers work, because the wage floor was set below what it costs to live here. In 2018 I started a volunteer campaign to raise it and ran it alongside the day job. Four years later, Hawaiʻi became the first state to write an $18 minimum wage into law.
Since 2022 I’ve worked at the Hawaiʻi Public Health Institute, where I’ve been Director of Policy and Advocacy since 2024. I lead advocacy strategy for several coalitions, and founded two of them: Clean Elections Hawaiʻi in 2023 and SNAP Access in 2024. In practice that means finding the change that’s actually available — a bill, a budget line, or a rule the state can simply stop applying — and then building the research, the relationships and the public pressure to get it done. Often I write the bill myself. Since 2019 I’ve testified on more than 20 bills. Seven became law.
