In October of 2025, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Luckily, I have access to affordable health insurance as I fight this disease.

Thanks to the Trump administration’s threats to Medicaid and marketplace subsidies, people fighting life-threatening conditions like mine won’t be able to afford life-saving treatment for their families and themselves. It is barbaric to condemn people to death because they can’t afford healthcare.

When elected, I will fight to ensure continued access to Apple Health in Washington State, and to protect critical state health programs from federal threats.

I want a high quality of life to be accessible to everyone, no matter their tax bracket. 

That means finding ways to fund public safety, social services, clean streets, affordable housing and economic opportunities through progressive revenue so that prosperity is possible for everyone who is willing to work for it.

As an Edmonds City Councilmember, I have always prioritized keeping our community affordable, beautiful, and welcoming for all. 

Because of my family’s history, I was always taught that education was the path to escaping poverty.

Without access to education, my family would have never been able to join the American middle class. My parents immigrated here from the Fiji Islands and were public school teachers for over 45 years. Growing up in a union household, I was lucky enough to have access to an excellent public education.  

It saddens me that college is not affordable to so many today, like it was when I was growing up. Tuition is heavily inflated, and costs need to once again be scrutinized and subsidized by the Washington State Legislature. Students shouldn’t have to graduate with a massive debt burden right at the start of their careers.

In 2024, over 3,000 people died of Opioid overdoses in Washington State. Imagine if we could have paid for all of those people to get free job training at the local community colleges, instead of abandoning them to die in despair?

Our regional homelessness crisis is not an accident. Our predecessors chose to turn their backs on the vulnerable when they stopped adequately funding social services, such as beds in treatment facilities and mental health institutions.

Building more housing is not enough to put a roof over everyone’s heads. It will take real political courage and real dedicated funding to social services throughout our state, not just in Seattle, to solve Washington’s homelessness crisis.

Every year, extreme weather events like the 2021 heat dome that killed hundreds of Washingtonians become increasingly common. The truth is, we are already paying the price of the climate crisis.

As a coastal state, we have to build climate resiliency into our communities for the sake of our survival. We cannot allow continued cowardice and inaction at the policy level – we must save our environment to save ourselves.