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Stanford University.
I remember when I was ten years old I was biking home from school and I almost got hit by a car.
I thought, “That’s just wrong—there should be a stop sign here.”
And so I came home and I told my parents, “but I don’t know where stop signs come from.”
And they said “well they come from the city, so you should call the mayor.”
So I looked her phone number up in the phone book and I called her.
And within a couple of weeks there were surveyors out there and within a few months there was a stop sign.
I was fortunate to feel like I could make a difference.
We see our purpose at the Haas Center as infusing the skills, attitudes, behaviors, and knowledge that students will
need to work in the real world dealing with real-life problems and real-life communities.
When I entered Stanford I knew that I wanted to work in public service but I don’t know that I had a really specific
idea of what that meant.
And so all throughout my four years I was able, through the Haas Center, to have direct service experience, spend
summers with nonprofit organizations and gain exposure through Alternative Spring Break trips.
Kiyomi is a wonderful example of a student who started in positions of direct service and then expanded her horizons
to our leadership development programs to continue a career serving others.
My sense is that her position in the California Senate is something that she has been able to do partly because of the
skills and attitudes and behaviors that she was able to develop while a student in our programs.
There are so many different activities that I did at the Haas Center while I was a student at Stanford.
One of them was an Alternative Spring Break trip where we visited a number of different organizations that work with
the Asian and Pacific Islander community.
And I saw that I could serve that community and other underrepresented communities through legal aid or nonprofits or
advocacy work or through working for an elected official.
And I really found that the latter was where I wanted to work.
And working for Senator Steinberg, you know day in and day out when he’s here on the senate floor voting on bills, I
feel like I’m helping advance a vision that will help improve California and improve people’s lives.
Haas makes a difference in the world through our alumni.
They see that their education, and particularly their connection with the Haas Center for Public Service, as something
that spawned, helped inspire, and helped move them towards a career in the service of others.
I think that Stanford has a really important role to play in training leaders, particularly in the public sector, but
all throughout the nonprofit sector and philanthropy as well, to really go out and use their education in a meaningful
way to solve some of the huge problems that we’re facing here in California and throughout the country and the world.