Her Story
About Sarah
I started my career studying law to jump into immigration law, but I happened to get my first internship that dealt with housing policy and housing education, specifically on the law and the side of fair housing and landlord-tenant. I worked directly with HUD to be able to educate big developers, landlords, and file fair housing discrimination cases. From there, I transitioned into Los Angeles County, where I moved to homeless services, which was a very big change for me because I only came from the housing side and the education side. When I jumped into homeless services, I really came in and filled this need and gap, where we know we need the landlords, we need the developers to work directly with our population, but there was nobody really guiding that field. I actually developed and built the county's first-ever landlord engagement centralized database, where we had a Zillow-like website that we were connecting available units to individuals through Homeless Services with all the support for the landlords. From there, it led to me building an entire department for mediation to avoid eviction for these individuals, assisting both parties - not only the clients themselves to not get evictions, but the owners to not have to spend so much money to evict these individuals. I was very lucky to get a call from the mayor's office one day when she ended up winning her first term, and she built a department focused around housing placement, where I was the main point of contact for only landlords and developers coming into the service. It is very interesting because I am the only female in a very big, male-dominated world, and all my clients are male. Now coming into the private sector, having the background of knowing the burden from the nonprofit world to the government, I'm able to come in and ensure that the system is operating the way it should operate.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Sarah
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
One of the biggest things is that you should always speak up and be heard. I do a lot of speaking, actually - I'm speaking to a few graduates who want to jump into homeless services next Friday. There's about a cohort, about 35 women who have graduated from the city of Los Angeles in their intern program. The biggest thing is, one, always feel like you have a place in this world. Never feel like you can't speak up for yourself. Two, make sure that what you say you're gonna do, you do. Relationships are very important in anything that we do, and at the end of the day, it's having a good heart and being passionate about the work that you do is what's gonna take you a long way. I'm very keen on assisting, especially women, because I haven't had a mentor to lift me up in my career. I've worked in a very difficult scope because the nonprofit world, believe it or not, it's very dog-eat-dog, especially in the government aspect. I've never really had a mentor to lift me up, but that's where my kind of focus became when I became in the leadership aspect - that was my biggest focus. How do I make sure that my staff have somebody to look up to? When you have a staff member that's engaged, when you have a staff member that feels like they are not only welcome in the space but have professional development, you're gonna get the best out of them. So I'm always very keen on leaving that mark and getting more females into the housing world, because there isn't as many as there should be, unfortunately.
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