Sarah Rose Smithson, M.A.

My path into this field really crystallized during my master's degree, when I found myself weighing my prospects and realizing that working at the international scale felt too removed from the kind of change I actually wanted to make. I kept coming back to the same question: how do you change the world without first changing your community? How do you change your community without first helping an individual? Real systemic change has to start at the grassroots level, and that's where I wanted to be.

Exploring careers across healthcare, hospitality, education, and IT only deepened that conviction — what I kept coming back to was my love of project management, program management, and administrative systems work. There's something deeply satisfying about taking a system and making it work better for the people it's meant to serve. Combining that with mission-driven work in direct service to my community felt like the clearest possible answer. I'm just trying to create the change I want to see, starting locally.

The best career advice I ever received is simply: have fun. If you're not having fun at work, you're probably not in the right job. That's especially true in human services, where the work can be heavy, and burnout is real — a genuine sense of levity makes all the difference between work that drains you and work that sustains you.

For me, that shows up in small, intentional ways. I prioritize building warm, easy relationships with my team, and I make a point of bringing lightness into the workday wherever I can. I even carry a basket of fidget toys to meetings — a little bit of play goes a long way toward keeping people present, comfortable, and connected, as well as prioritizing accessibility for Neurodivergent professionals such as myself.

Don't be afraid to take risks and experiment until you find your fit. Good work should feel meaningful and genuinely enjoyable — and your body will tell you when you're in the wrong environment. Trust that signal.

I'd also say: invest in your relationships with your coworkers more than you think you need to. Strong teams don't happen by accident, and your ability to build trust, navigate conflict, and show up for the people around you will matter just as much as any technical skill on your resume. Prioritize those things early, and they'll carry you far.

We're operating in one of the most challenging moments this field has ever seen. The federal landscape is increasingly hostile — transgender people are actively having their rights stripped, and rhetoric labeling gender-affirming advocacy as "radical" or even domestic terrorism creates a chilling effect on the work we do and the communities we serve. The stakes couldn't be higher.

At the same time, New Mexico is rising to meet that moment. For the first time in history, our women-dominated legislature has made extraordinary strides in protecting New Mexicans, and the state is becoming a true sanctuary in every sense of the word. That's genuinely inspiring — and it's something worth fighting to protect.

On the funding side, the writing is on the wall for nonprofits that have relied heavily on federal dollars. Diversifying funding streams isn't just a best practice anymore — it's a survival strategy. I'm seeing organizations across the sector prioritize that shift, and it's the right move.

Locally, homelessness in the Albuquerque metro is at a crisis point. The solutions exist — they're being proposed by the communities most affected — and what's needed now is the political will from the Mayor's office and city council to actually implement them. Continuing to sidestep structural solutions isn't just ineffective, it's a choice with real human consequences.

Mission alignment is everything to me. Whether I'm at work or volunteering my time, I need to believe in what I'm doing and feel it connects to something larger than a paycheck or a task list. That's what drew me to the nonprofit sector, and it's what keeps me rooted there.

Community is at the center of that — human and otherwise. I'm a passionate LGBTQ+ advocate; I've sat on the roundtable for Equality New Mexico and continue to dedicate real time and energy to advocacy work in that space. But my sense of community extends to animals, too. I've done extensive fostering over the years, including a lot of bottle babies during quarantine, and I've volunteered with Jemez Valley Animal Amigos on rural drive-in vaccination and mobile spay-and-neuter clinics. I even currently foster a leopard gecko for a participant who lives in my office building. Animals deserve advocacy just as much as people do, and that work fills me up in a way that's hard to describe.

Creativity is a deeply held value, not just a skill set. I'm a multimedia artist, graphic designer, illustrator, zine maker, and tarot reader, and making things — whether that's a painting, a collage, a zine, a brand identity, or a tarot spread — is fundamental to how I process and engage with the world. I bring that creative sensibility into my professional work wherever I can, because I believe well-designed systems and communications aren't just more effective, they're more humane. Art and advocacy have always felt intertwined to me.

Curiosity rounds it all out. I'm a voracious reader who can clear a 300-page book in a day when I'm really in it, and I'm drawn to the strange and wonderful corners of the world. Natural history museums, pinned insect collections, taxidermy in the classical sense — I find that kind of careful, reverent documentation of the natural world deeply compelling. Wherever I travel, I'm always hunting down the best museums and restaurants in town.

Ultimately, what ties it all together is a belief that good work should be meaningful, grounded in relationships, and oriented toward justice — for people, for communities, and for the living world around us.