Candidate for
Member, Community College Board; County of San Francisco

I am a walking example of the opportunities that higher education provides to people. Having gone from high school drop out to Ph.D. in less than 20 years, I feel strongly about the importance of higher education and the opportunities that it can bring. Community College is often the entryway to higher education, and we have to work to keep it available, accessible, and affordable for the entire community.

My own experiences in community college and higher education sparked my passion for education policy and civic involvement. This passion ultimately led me to obtain my Ph.D., to tutor and mentor students, to teach at a university level, and to develop high-standard curricula. It also led me to conduct policy research and to serve on several boards and task forces.

San Francisco City College is ripe for new perspectives, and I bring a fresh, pragmatic approach to decision making, coming in during an already economically struggling time with new, creative ideas for increasing revenue and making hard decisions. With accreditation at stake, it's critical that we have an informed, accountable leader involved in the process. I am that leader. WASC (the accrediting agency) has emphasized that the key weaknesses of the college involve issues related to governance and data, such as using outcome measures to determine the college's needs and to drive decision making. I work with data and outcome measures to drive decision making and implement evidence-based practices in my day job. For nearly a decade I have worked as a researcher and evaluator, determining what the most appropriate outcome measures are for a particular situation and how best to measure data elements, conducting evaluations and assessments to see what's working and what's not working, and implementing evidence-based practices. As an adjunct professor for many years, I also bring to the Board a faculty perspective that prioritizes academic freedom, course load concerns, and comprehensive curricula. I also have experience working with WASC as a graduate student, when my school went through a similar process and I was a student government representative for 7 campuses while coordinating with the Board and university president.

In addition to my policy and faculty experience, I have been a leader in the women's community and the Jewish community in San Francisco. I have served on the San Francisco Women's Political Committee (SFWPC) as a policy advocate for issues dealing with girls and women, and as part of that I worked with other members of the women's community to create a collaborative of all San Francisco women's organizations so that we could work together to achieve common goals. One of the outcomes of this was the annual women's policy summit, which resulted in common annual policy goals for the women's community. As the Policy Chair I also helped work on legislation to expand the Maddy Act help fill the political pipeline with women, which was introduced by Supervisor Chiu and ultimately passed. In addition, as president of National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW-SF), I shaped the policy agenda to focus on combating human trafficking, preventing family violence, promoting girls' education, advocating for restorative justice, and fighting for reproductive rights. I currently serve on the United Way's Women's Leadership Council, whose goal is to reduce poverty in the Bay Area by half by 2020. I am a graduate of Emerge California, a program that trains democratic women to run for office, and was elected as a delegate for the 19th Assembly District of the CA Democratic Party in January 2011. I am also informally involved in several women's networking and mentoring organizations. I have raised money, phone banked, and walked countless precincts for local democratic candidates. I also registered voters and phone banked for Obama during the 2008 campaign.