“As a child growing up in San Francisco in the 1970s we would have newly arrived Chinese immigrants come through our apartment door. In her spare time my mom, herself a newly arrived immigrant, would help people sort out things like how to settle parking ticket fines or get a license to operate an acupuncture or Chinese herbal medicine clinic. When I got to college it became clear to me that I wanted to do what my mom did in a way that could impact systemic structural change and transform people’s lives for the better.”
Pamela brings the unique combination of experiences in organizing with multi-racial and multi-lingual populations, creating infrastructure and strategy for the environmental justice movement of the 1990s, and understanding of how to transform leaders and organizations to be more powerful and sustainable.
Prior to joining the Center for Community Change (CCC) as a field organizer in 2004, Pamela helped create the Southwest Network for Environmental & Economic Justice (SNEEJ) and the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) in a time when grassroots communities around the country elevated the issue of environmental racism, promoted the banner frame of “environmental justice” and brought people to work together toward shared purpose. Her organizing contributed to organization building and movement building that resulted in sweeping national policy change with the Environmental Protection Agency.
A primary theme in Pamela’s leadership style is her ability to help create lasting relationships between people and organizations from diverse racial, cultural, and geographic experiences. Over her 15 years as an organizer, Pamela has organized with rural Mexican farmworker communities fighting incinerators and prisons, Native American tribes fighting nuclear contamination or toxic dumping, and African Americans and Asian and Latino immigrants and refugees demanding workplace and community health and safety.
Since 2008, Pamela has refined her years of experience to coach leaders to be more effective, train teams of people to accomplish greater results with less effort, and guide organizations through processes that help them become extraordinary. She did that as Director of Organizational Learning during a six-year effort with the Center for Communication Change. She continues this work as president of Chiange Inc. with leaders around the United States and increasingly around the world.
Pamela is also a trained mediator and holds a BA in environmental science from the University of California at Berkeley. She resides in Montana on a ranch with her husband and two young sons where they raise Quarterhorses and Corriente cattle, and employ sustainable agricultural management practices.
