Answer:

I’m a mom of a 16-month old, but just a few weeks ago I was a mom of a 15-month old and Executive Director of Partnerships for Healthy Communities, a community-based organization in Commerce City, Colorado outside of Denver. This very moment, I’m most certainly basking in my newfound freedom and wondering what’s going on at my old office. I spent the last few years gestating and nursing a small human and running a small nonprofit. It's your run-of-the-mill ABCD (Asset Based Community Development), community-based participatory approach stuff for fellow AMIGOS - and your super-progressive public health stuff for non-AMIGOS.

Q: How did you become involved with AMIGOS?
A: A friend of my mom’s encouraged me to apply to be a Corresponent Volunteer (CV) when I was a junior in high school in Plano, Texas. I loved CV training. I’ll never forget meeting Kristin Fischer at our gateway training. I was in awe of her. Regional Director seemed like such an awesome job (and it still does). AMIGOS was just what I’d been looking for – an adventure and a chance to hone my Spanish skills. I had no idea that it would change my life.

Q: What about your summer experience had the biggest impact on you?
A: When I was volunteer in Oaxaca with Cara Power Marasco, one of our friends confided in us that the physician who visited our community every month was secretly prescribing her birth control. At 26, she had six children and wasn’t interested in having any more. If her husband discovered her secret, he might leave her and people in town would accuse her of witchcraft. At that moment, my passion for international women’s health and social justice was born. From that moment on, I was committed to ensuring that every woman had a say in if, when and under what circumstances she became a mother.

Q: In what way do you feel you had the biggest impact on your host community?
A: I hope that I left the impression in all the communities who hosted me that Americans can be compassionate, humble and funny. The community members I worked with had a much larger impact on me than I ever did on them.

Q: How did the experience affect your values, education or career path? 
A: After volunteering, I went onto to major in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. After working in women’s health clinics in Austin for a couple of years after graduating, I still felt like I needed more skills to truly serve community members, so I went and got a graduate degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. After grad school, I needed a dose of reality and came back to AMIGOS as project director in Honduras – with an absolutely incredible staff. Each time I went back to serve AMIGOS, principles of community-based participatory approaches and appreciate inquiry were further embedded into the way I work with communities.

Q: Did any of the lessons you learned then stick with you until today? 
A: Read the Partnerships for Healthy Communities blog, and you’ll see that everything I know for sure, I learned from AMIGOS.

Q: How has AMIGOS affected your life? Did it help you get to where you are today?
A: I’m always blown away by the AMIGOS connection. Our latest project at Partnerships for Healthy Communities is a community garden behind the office. We’re working with a progressive group of people to involve diverse families who could really use some free produce this summer – Somali refugees and Spanish-speaking immigrants and a whole host of community leaders. I just found out that Annie Miller, one of the garden leaders from our local health department, is a fellow AMIGO. I knew I liked her from the minute she showed up with bags of seeds, a truck full of compost and some fruit trees, and I wasn’t at all surprised when we made the AMIGOS connection. The coolest people I know are AMIGOS. Angie Johnson Graves was my first mentor. Amalia Wille is studying immigration law in San Fransciso. Alex Steffler is reforming our education system at The New Teacher Project. I could go on and on...

Q: What have you accomplished or what are you proud to be currently working on?
A: I’m proud that 16 years after AMIGOS first taught me, I continue to believe that I can do anything. If it weren’t for an organization that trusted the teenaged me to lead a community development project in another country, I wouldn’t have continued to take wildly enormous, totally unquantifiable risks into adulthood. I got engaged seven weeks into dating my husband – to the dismay of family and friends. Thanks, AMIGOS. I took a job as an executive director at 29 with an organization that didn’t have enough cash in the bank to pay me - then grew its budget by almost 10 times in three years. Thanks, AMIGOS. Not everything works out, but at our house when things go haywire, we say: “Next time, fail harder.” Thanks, AMIGOS.