The redistricting process is key to our democracy and a unique strength in our constitutional republic. I wish to serve on the Commission to be part of the impartial process of ensuring all communities have an opportunity to provide input, as well as an opportunity to secure meaningful representation.

Throughout my life and career, as described below, I have been committed to public service. Serving on the Citizens Redistricting Commission for California would provide me with a unique opportunity to serve the citizens of California. I seek to be part of the impartial line drawing process to ensure that geographically and demographically diverse communities across California have an opportunity to effectively participate in the electoral process.

As a young man in the 1950s, my father left his Mexican village to become a Bracero, or guest worker, in the agricultural fields of Sonoma County in pursuit of the American Dream. He worked during a time when uninsured, low-income individuals, and particularly ethnic and cultural minorities, had difficulty accessing affordable health care services.

Later, my father would turn to community clinics to secure health care for our family. As a child, I remember the exam rooms of my childhood community health clinic, La Clinica de la Raza in Oakland, CA, where I reaped the benefits of community clinics as a patient.
I have committed my career to ensuring that all people, regardless of who they are, what they look like, where they came from, or their ability to pay, have access to affordable, high-quality, patient-centered health care. After graduating from Stanford University, I was elected by the clinic patients to serve on the board of directors of La Clinica. After graduating from Cornell Law School, I served as the Director of Government & Community Relations for the Redwood Community Health Coalition, a network of community health centers that serve over 250,000 people in Sonoma, Marin, Napa and Yolo counties. Today, as Chief Administrative Officer of Petaluma Health Center, I work every day to ensure that all people in Southern and Central Sonoma County have access to affordable, high-quality, patient-centered health care.

Over the past 50 years, Community Health Centers increased access to high quality health care to demographically and geographically diverse communities across California. Community Health Centers effectively expand health access to diverse populations because their patient-led board of directors reflects the demographics of their service area. This guarantees that clinic executives like me are overseen by the people who receive medical and dental services at their facilities. Our diverse communities have a voice in determining the direction of the organization that provides their health care.

I work every day to ensure that our diverse community members have a voice in their healthcare and I would like an opportunity to serve the 2020 Citizens Redistricting Commission to ensure that demographically and geographically diverse communities across California have a voice in the electoral process, and have an opportunity to secure meaningful representation.

Impartiality encompasses the ability to set aside personal views to evaluate information with an open mind and make decisions that are fair to all affected, as well as compliant with federal, state, and local laws and regulations. The ability to be impartial is an essential qualification for the commissioner position and as a community leader in statewide and local initiatives, the decisions I make often require impartiality.

When making public policies or decisions on this commission, not everyone will be happy with the final districts, but they must have assurance that the districts were drawn fairly and that appropriate criteria were thoughtfully and legally evaluated and applied by an impartial body.

Through our personal and professional experiences such as education, involvement in community and actions such as donations to social causes and non-profits, we all express our values and principles. The practice of impartiality ensures that while people may have participated in social or personal causes, they can set aside his or her personal views and evaluate the available information with an open mind and make fair decisions.

When I served on executive board for the California Children's Health Initiatives, I worked with my fellow board members to ensure that our limited resources were used to enroll as many low-income children as possible into health care coverage, and that hard-to-reach populations across the state of California had the opportunity to enroll in health coverage. While on the board, I was able to set aside my personal views to evaluate information with an open mind and made efforts to hear from diverse voices from across the state in order to make fair and equitable decisions.

As board chair of Healthy Kids Sonoma County, I worked with our board of directors to ensure that all children in Sonoma County had access to health coverage, and a trusted source of health care. I worked to ensure that all stakeholders (hospitals, clinics, community-based organizations, patients, etc.) had an opportunity to provide input to our strategic goals and important decisions. When evaluating information and data on the allocation of outreach and enrollment resources, I would set aside my personal views and evaluate the information, data, and maps with an open mind, ensure that the board had heard from diverse voices from across our county, in order to make fair decisions.

My background, particularly when making difficult decisions that have a direct impact on person's lives, reinforces the principle of impartiality. Throughout my career, when serving on boards and committees, I have succeeded in being able to set aside my personal views in order to evaluate information with an open mind to make fair decisions and achieve common goals.

I was born in Berkeley, raised in the City of Alameda and currently live in Petaluma. For work and recreation, I regularly travel across California's very different geographic regions to experience and appreciate California's diverse demographics, cultures, and communities.

My undergraduate degree from Stanford University was in Anthropology and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, which exposed me to demographically and geographically diverse communities and increased my knowledge of how we can work together to understand each other and improve cooperation between people of different cultures around the state, the country and the world.

While working as the Director of Community and Government Relations for Redwood Community Health Coalition (RCHC), I worked with and learned from demographically and geographically diverse community leaders from across California. Representing clinics in the counties of Marin, Sonoma, Napa and Yolo, I traveled extensively, visiting underrepresented populations in urban and rural settings. RCHC's network of clinics provides health care services to over 250,000 medically-underserved patients across the region, serving very diverse populations including homeless individuals, business leaders, farmworkers and elected officials, as well as everyone in between. Working with other health networks across the state, I traveled to rural communities in Northern California, the Central Valley, the Bay Area and Southern California to learn from other regional health clinic networks. I was honored to meet patients and community leaders in an effort to share strategies in community outreach, marketing, advocacy, and clinical operations. This helped us to ensure that the diverse medically underserved people in the communities they serve had access to prevention-focus health care.

In my current role as the Chief Administrative Officer at Petaluma Health Center, I work directly with the great diversity of people in our service area. I am charged with ensuring that demographically and geographically diverse patients have a voice in how their health care is delivered, and that they also have an opportunity to serve on our patient-led board of directors.

I have also served as the President of the Hispanic Chamber of Sonoma County where I worked with local businesses, community-based organizations and government agencies to develop opportunities to grow small minority-owned businesses, and to provide professional development opportunities for emerging Latino business leaders.

Serving on the Covered California Marketing, Outreach and Enrollment Assistance Advisory Group, and California Children's Health Initiatives, I worked with stakeholders in my local community and across the state to ensure that as many medically-underserved people enrolled in health insurance, many for the first time in their lives. I worked with certified enrollment workers, met uninsured persons and endeavored to educate and enroll uninsured people from demographically and geographically diverse communities across California. Through this work, I came to have an even greater appreciation for the diverse background of citizens of our state.

Over the years, I have been involved in myriad projects that involve gathering and comprehending complicated information, and evaluating and analyzing the validity and significance of complex data and information to make sound decisions.

As a graduate from Cornell Law School, I am trained to read, analyze and apply the law. As the Chief Administrative Officer at Petaluma Health Center, I work to ensure that our organization has the systems and processes to ensure that we are in compliance with federal, state, and local laws and regulations, as well as rules from our accreditation bodies.

I have extensive experience with providing testimony at community and public hearings. I have experience testifying at legislative hearings for health care initiatives in Sacramento and even in teaching groups of community leaders and elected officials about the role of community clinics across the state. As a compliance officer at Petaluma Health Center, I must review complicated data and information and distill the information after reviewing and evaluating the information. I determine what information is critical and pertinent and differentiate it from important but non-essential information.

While at Redwood Community Health Coalition, I was often called upon to conduct policy analysis to distinguish facts from opinion, to distinguish relevant from irrelevant facts, and to assess arguments. Policy briefs and legislative testimony involves the distillation of key facts and the ability to present them in the context of either the law or to make the case for a coherent public policy. Further, I am very comfortable with mathematical and statistical data and mapping, especially as it relates to outreach and enrollment or community engagement.

Much of my work in health care involves analysis of complex data. Often this work requires me to conduct regression analysis, and other statistical tools to improve health outcomes and access to care in a cost-effective manner. After the passage of the Affordable Care Act, my work across California on increasing enrollment required statistical analysis of diverse populations from across the state to target outreach, marketing, and enrollment initiatives.

In 2014, Petaluma Health Center's board of directors launched an effort to open new health clinic sites for people who lacked adequate access to health care. In addition to conducting vigorous discussions with local community leaders and members of the public, I gathered and evaluated community health care data to submit to government agencies and local philanthropists. These analytical tasks were paramount to developing effective business and outreach plans, which allowed us to double the number of people we serve over the last 5 years.

As a federal grant reviewer for the Health Resources and Services Administration, I served on grant review teams that applied complex standards to evaluate federal grant proposals. This process required reading thousands of pages of health care program expansion proposals, evaluating proposals against objective evaluation criteria and building consensus with team members to make fair decisions.

I volunteer on various non-profit boards and advisory committees. Over the years, I have served on the boards of the California Children's Health Initiative, La Clinica de La Raza, the Hispanic Chamber of Sonoma County, the Sonoma County Workforce Investment Board, and the Redwood Empire Food Bank. All of these experiences have allowed me to engage with and learn from California's diverse communities. On occasion, I am asked by government agencies to provide public testimony on policy issues relating to access to health care, health care services , health care coverage, and/or community health centers.