Primary Election Date: 05/15/2012
General Election Date: 11/06/2012

Who Am I?

I grew up in Cornelius, Oregon on my family’s Century Farm, picking strawberries, loading trucks and driving combine every summer growing up starting when I was 5 years old. In college, I started getting involved on issues I cared about through the campus student government. While on campus, I worked to fight the skyrocketing tuition increases of the 1990’s and prioritized registering students to vote in local elections. In 1998, I was elected the vice-president of the student body.

Civic participation became a calling for me after school. I continued the work I started on campus as a student organizer and advocate, fighting for affordable higher education, voter registration, and taking on big banks and payday lenders to stop outrageous fees and interest rates.

I then worked with college students all across the state and all across the county, eventually becoming the National Field Director for the New Voters Project, a national voter registration and youth voter participation campaign that registered hundreds of thousands of voters.

Beginning in 2007, a fight to save my family farm got me started running political electoral campaigns. When a rollback to Oregon’s one-of-a-kind land use laws threatened to build hundreds of homes on and near my family’s farm in Cornelius, I took a job as the field director for the successful Yes on 49 campaign, the farm and open space measure that saved farms all around the state, including my family farm.

Electoral success gave me the campaign bug, and I continued to work for issues and people I believed in. I ran John Kroger’s successful campaign for Attorney General and had the opportunity to work for Attorney General Kroger in the Department of Justice. While at DOJ, among other accomplishments, I helped Kroger start the environmental crimes unit and the civil rights unit, and aided in passing a law that held overly aggressive debt collectors accountable when they break the law. I now own and run my own small business – a strategic planning, campaign and communication firm – working on school and public safety levies, among other important campaigns.

Why Am I Running?

I’ve spent my whole life working to make Oregon a better place to live. As a state legislator I’ll take action every day to tackle Oregon’s biggest problems and solve them in a way that helps create more jobs and more opportunity for Oregonians. I would be honored to have your vote.

Hold Me Accountable!

I will fight to protect consumers from fraud and abuse, and our farms, forests, and open space from sprawl.

My DFA values:

I am blessed to be running in the area I grew up in. This gives me a vast community of friends and neighbors that I've known for my entire life, to tap into for support. An understanding of the key issues in the area, and a passions to deal with them have also been instilled in me my entire life.

My Campaign is People-Powered!

1. Organizing an incredibly ambitious door program that will involve hundreds of volunteer shifts within about six weeks.

2. Holding house parties throughout the district to meet the constituents on a very personal level.