Maya (she/they) is working class legislative advocate, educator, artist, and organizer with a MA degree and more than 25 years of diverse life & work experience who regularly fights for all of our futures.

She knows that governments and societies work best when they protect the most precarious people first. Maya believes the purpose of power is to lift everyone into thriving and belonging, and they're running for Whatcom County Charter Review Commissioner in District 2 with the goal of protecting and advancing people's rights; ensuring greater transparency, accountability, and inclusion in local governance, and ushering in our eventual County-wide adoption of ranked choice voting!

Maya identifies as Latina/é from a mixed race white and Bolivian family, and is a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community as a Les-Queer, non-binary woman who came out when she was in her late teens. While Maya relocated to Bellingham in 2018, her extended family has lived in Bellingham, the Skagit Valley, and the greater Seattle area, and eastern WA for various numbers of generations ranging from first, to upwards of five.

 

Fun facts about Maya:
 

• Inspired by lived experience of poverty and housing precarity, and the work of Rep. Cori Bush, Maya is working on asking our WA Legislature to end our unhoused crisis, and is the author and main advocate of this resolution in Support of a WA Unhoused Persons Bill of Rights, to help address a major gap in the rights of people who are unhoused which was recently worsened in very serious and threatening ways by the US Supreme Court's recent majority ruling on Grants Pass v Johnson.
   

• Maya supports organized labor, and helped push for a 2021 local people's initiative to the ballot that has protected workers from City funds being used against their organizing, which also precludes any interference in worker-organizing and/or pickets by BPD.
   

• They're a people's legislative advocate with deep knowledge about digital rights and tech justice issues. Maya founded WA People's Privacy in late 2021/early 2022, an entity that promotes people's legislative advocacy in these areas.
   

• They worked to strengthen and defend the actual bill text and definitions in our 2023 WA My Health My Data Act, and witnessed this bill signed into law! This was a first-of-its-kind-in-the-nation health data privacy law, and was passed as part of slate of bills that protected access to abortion and gender-affirming care in WA State!
   

• Maya's been a community educator, organizer and advocate for many years, and pursued a MA degree in teaching (adult ed) over a decade ago, which allowed them to live and work in other countries.
   

• Maya's dream after undergrad was law school, and that roughly $300K price tag wasn't attainable. But, she worked as the Administrator at Equal Rights Advocates in San Francisco for few years after undergrad, helping to prep documents for the appeal on the Dukes v Wal-Mart case in the Ninth Circuit. (💪 ERA won that appeal! But, sadly 😭 lost the subsequent appeal to the SCOTUS just a few years later. Had SCOTUS upheld the Ninth Circuit ruling, it would have certified the largest employment class action in American history, or in that case, herstory, because it was a class of all women workers!)

Positions / Maya's Values:
 

Maya supports participatory democracy, including democracy vouchers, participatory budgeting, and greater transparency and engagement with people in the workings of governance. She also supports public banking, so that we can keep investments and profits local, and eventually provide access to financial services to people who are unbanked.

Maya is an advocate for the continuous expansion and advancing of people's rights, well-being, and belonging including:
 

• Transformative justice.

• Healthcare for all.

• Honoring lived experience.

• Racial justice and equity.

• Climate justice.

• Food & housing justice.

• Reproductive justice, which includes access to abortion, contraception, and prioritizes and ensures the health and safety of birthing parents' who are Black and Brown – generally that's women, and trusts their knowledge and expertise about their own bodies, including but not limited to pain levels, seriousness of symptoms and conditions, and what they need to thrive. Abortion is healthcare.

• Gender justice: Trans and LGBTQ+ rights, including to housing, employment, our courts, safe travel and healthcare. Gender-affirming care is healthcare.

• Women's rights.

• Immigrant rights, including to safe and well-paid work, the right to due process and safety, the right to seek asylum, and the rights of families to stay together.

• Ending poverty.

• Expanding Indigenous people's rights, and ensuring adherence to existing treaty rights.

• Inclusion, disability justice, and meeting people's needs: ensuring that everyone has equitable access and everyone belongs.
   

And more! ...but we'll stop there. This is kind of a long list!