Valerie is a Civic Engagement Coordinator in the Civic Engagement Department at the Dolores Huerta Foundation. She helps activate community members by sharing tools and strategies they need to advocate for themselves and their community via leadership development, community organizing, policy advocacy, and civic engagement within Vecinxs, Youth, and Volunteers in Get Out the Vote efforts for the 2024 primary and general elections, continuing redistricting campaigns in targeted areas, and actively pushing forth and collaborating with our criminal, immigration, and environmental justice partners.
She is currently a UCLA Law Fellow and HSI Scholar accredited with an English Major and Public Affairs Minor. She has over six years of experience working with restorative justice and intersectionality frameworks and has devised policies, workshops, presentations, mentorship, and advocacy while coordinating feasible goals and addressing potential pushback. Throughout her undergraduate career at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, she gained experience in research, urban planning, and policy memo writing at the grassroots, county, state, and UC levels. Her honors dissertation on Mental Illness in the Criminal Justice System includes the power of politics and social change working hand in hand.
Her heart rests in the San Fernando Valley and Ward 1 Southeast Bakersfield. She has Co-Coordinated the Community and Labor Component and was later elected as Co-Chair of MEChA de UCLA during her undergrad at UCLA where she applied ethnic studies within LAUSD youth initiatives such as danza azteca, graffiti art, and poetry. She helped champion and prioritized the addition of the newly incorporated Black Resource Center within UCLA’s Student Activities Center for student retention and solidarity. She’s worked within and alongside outside and local organizations such as Kern Literacy Program, BruinCorps, CHIRLA, MEChA de CSUN & UCLA, Underground Scholar’s Initiative, AB540 Project, Garment Workers Center, The People’s Struggle San Fernando Valley, AFSCME 3299 where she actively mobilized students, lecturers, and UC workers for better pay and tenure stay. Community engagement and advocacy have been at the forefront of her endeavors along with prior experience as a Young Assemblymember under former 32nd District Assemblymember Rudy Salas in 2019 and City Councilman for Ward 1 Bakersfield in 2020. Growing up in a carceral and system-impacted setting developed her social justice consciousness, so her efforts became part of her craft, close to home.
