>> First I went to Long Beach City College and
that's a local community college near my home
in Long Beach California and when I exited the
program during that time I worked for the YMCA.
I've always had a passion
and love for my community;
I really feel that when I give back I have a
great sense of value and purpose for myself.
So I worked for the YMCA for
six years and during the end
of that time I was getting my
Master's degree here at USC
and when I completed my Master's program I
met some interesting individuals who worked
for the County of Los Angeles and we
talked about my goals and my dreams
of growing Long Beach and helping
Long Beach and investing back
in my neighborhood where I grew up.
they said those are all really good and
powerful things and you should continue to do
that as a volunteer and you should continue to
do that in your neighborhood and one of the ways
that you can be really effective for your
local neighborhood is take on a bigger role
in the government that makes decisions about
how your neighborhood is impacted so an example
of that is the senior programs that I help with,
feed seniors all over LA County from Long Beach
to Antelope Valley and so I took the leap and
I left my job and went to work for the County
of Los Angeles and I started out in a program
which at the time was called
administrative intern,
before that it was called management trainee,
after that it was called management fellow
and it's a program where you rotate
through all the areas of the government.
So to be an effective manager you usually
supervise so you need to know the HR rules
and regulations that you need to abide by and
teach the staff about so that within the context
of your workplace you can ensure
that those people are getting growth
and development opportunities,
you're providing them with resources,
you're breaking down red tape and barriers
and then you're giving them the
credit for the work that they do.
Then from there I rotated into another
division to work on a special project in terms
of making changes to the county, we wrote
the plan, a female friend that I had met
at USC Master's program we were chosen to write
the county wide management mentoring program.
So we took bits of information and data from
all the best programs across the country,
we pulled from the GAO website for the
national government, we pulled from the state
of California big Brothers program and
said what does it mean to have a mentor
and how do you formulize that
structure and what is a menti
and really every menti should have
a menti because they must know how
to utilize their mentor when they are one.
So we put together this program and got
it funded at a 400 thousand dollar level
which sounds massive and we helped
put together that structure,
then I rotated into another division where I
learned about exams, how do we hire people,
how do we recruit talent, how do we ensure
that the process by which bring people
into the organization is fair and
balanced and then once we bring people
into the organization how do we ensure
that we're promoting the right people,
what mechanisms do we measure and all
of those components and then I got
to spend a year in the budget office.
And in the budget office it really
just aligned with my strengths.