At the age of 19, I established my first social venture, Emerge, which has gone on to equip 1300+ girls who have survived sexual abuse with the business acumen, life skills, and capital needed to lead healthy, self-sufficient lives. Using jewelry creation as a tool for education, art therapy, and financial empowerment, Emerge has enabled these courageous girls to launch businesses, finance education, and even build homes.

After moving to San Francisco and seeing the amount of child trafficking that exists, I co-founded Freedom Forward, a social innovation lab that prevents the commercial sexual exploitation of youth in San Francisco by transforming the systems that too often contribute to their exploitation. Guided by the voices of youth, Freedom Forward pilots collaborative and replicable approaches to address these systemic failures, so that all youth have the opportunity to thrive.

As a Field Strategist, I focused on exceptional ways to develop, connect, and mobilize youth leadership to forge solutions across the Global South. My role included identifying key bottlenecks in the field (and finding those people working to resolve them), matchmaking for resource and talent allocation, and developing a community of engagement throughout the process.

In 2023, I served as the first COO for the Latin American Leadership Academy (LALA), an organization that finds, develops, and connects young, proximate leaders across Latin America who are passionate about transforming problems in their communities. LALA reduces the barriers youth face to becoming transformational leaders and supports them in charting their own pathway to social mobility, community change, and collective impact. As COO, I oversaw operations, finance, HR and culture, leadership camps, and systems to support our growth.

Through Jasmine, I worked with seven youth consultants to develop a video, website, and campaign to shift traditional anti-trafficking narratives and connect youth to resources. Collectively, our “Secret Jasmines” (consultants) had experienced sex trafficking, the juvenile justice and foster care systems, homelessness, commercial sexual exploitation, and the street economy. Jasmine has 46K+ views across platforms and was integrated into Oakland Unified School District’s sex ed curriculum.

I was elected chair of the Child Trafficking Committee for San Francisco’s Mayor’s Task Force on Anti-Human Trafficking Committee in 2017, where I brought in a co-chair model for leadership succession. I also developed the country’s first Youth Advisory Board for an anti-trafficking task force and supported youth in meaningful participation through a year-long leadership fellowship. Fellows received recognition from California Senator Feinstein.

I curated prevention resources for caregivers and partnered with consultants to develop age-appropriate prevention curriculum to support parents and caregivers in keeping the children in their life safe from trafficking.

After a series of focus groups with youth, where youth asked us to co-locate services, I secured funding and partnered with local organizations to launch a youth drop-in center designed for youth by youth. Our design process engaged them in assessing local needs, identifying a name, developing the logo, and connecting with initial partners.