I was born and raised in the Greater New Orleans area, part of a family that has called this city home for generations, with roots that stretch deep into Louisiana's River Parishes where my ancestors, descendants of enslaved Africans, built lives and communities in what the world now calls Cancer Alley. I lost my grandfather to cancer after decades of working in the petrochemical industry, a man who went to church three days a week and put all seven of his children through college, and his death was not an isolated tragedy but a window into the truth that the people I come from have been treated as expendable for generations.
Then came Katrina. I was eight years old, too young to vote but old enough to understand that the storm exposed not just a natural disaster but a wholesale abandonment by the institutions that were supposed to protect us. Those two realities, the slow violence inflicted on our River Parishes and the betrayal after the storm, are what first called me into the work of justice.
By fourteen I was knocking doors for Barack Obama's campaign on weekends and after school, driven by the belief that change was actually possible. That fire carried me from New Orleans to Northern Arizona where I organized alongside Indigenous and Latino communities, labor unions and fought for reproductive justice as a field organizer with Planned Parenthood, and eventually across the country on the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign. I earned my BA in Constitutional Law and Public Policy and Urban Planning and Sustainability from Prescott College, and later my MA in Social Justice and Community Organizing from the same institution before coming back home to Louisiana because the fight here is personal and it always has been.
Today I serve as Director of Political Operations for Voters Organized to Educate, where I lead political strategy, legislative campaigns, and electoral engagement for one of the state's most respected grassroots justice organizations. I founded the Leadership Institute, a project of Voters Organized to Educate, that trains community members in political education and faith rooted leadership with graduates who have gone on to win elected office. In 2024 I ran for Congress in Louisiana's 2nd District on a people powered platform that raised over $120,000 entirely from grassroots donors, mobilized more than 150 volunteers, and brought attention to the environmental racism devastating Cancer Alley and the insurance crisis pricing families out of their homes.
My organizing has always been shaped by my faith. I grew up in the Black Baptist church tradition and today I am pursuing a Master of Divinity at Pacific School of Religion, studying at the intersection of theology, liberation, and community transformation. That same conviction drives me as an entrepreneur through Bel Fanmi Café and Bakery, a business rooted in Southern and Creole baking traditions that puts community wealth and cultural legacy at the center of what it means to build something of our own. Ministry, movement work, and enterprise are not separate callings for me but expressions of the same one: confront injustice wherever it lives and build institutions worthy of the people we love.
