Candidate for
Council Member; City of Redwood City

I was born in New York City to a Guatemalan father who met my American mother in New York while here in the US studying for his PhD. When I was eight months old, we moved to Guatemala. We spent the next sixteen years moving around in Central America and Europe. I attended first grade at the US Army base school in Karlsruhe, Germany. Six schools later, I went to a catholic co-ed high school, Academia del Perpetuo Soccorro- Our Lady of Perpetual Help, in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Then I attended Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania where although I started as a physics major, I ended up majoring in economics. After college I worked for an advertising agency headquartered on Madison Avenue in New York City, McCaffrey and McCall since bought out by Saatchi and Saatchi Advertising. After which, I applied for an International MBA dual program in New York and Paris.

I first came to the Bay Area when I was hired by an Israeli software start-up to head their US division, We sold that start-up to Intel Corp. After that, I helped run an auto repair shop in Sunnyvale. During that time I became an industry representative to the Bureau of Automotive Repair, chaired a task-force on Governor Schwarzenegger's Conference on Entrepreneurship and was the industry delegate to the Western Regional White House Conference.

The job I am most proud of is of being a mother. I have an eighteen year old daughter that just graduated from Sequoia High School and is now attending Foothill and a twenty two year old son that graduated from Kehillah JHS and Notre Dame de Namur. For the last five years, we have lived in Docktown, a floating community on Redwood Creek. Not long after we moved here I became president of the residents association and started to get involved in Redwood City local issues.

I am running for City Council member in the hope that I can contribute to creating a sustainable Redwood City Community. My background has given me top notch small business, strategic thinking and mediator skills. All of these professional and life skills will be required of council members as we create our future together.

Professional Linkedin profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/taniasole