PACT Reflection 1

Bridget Quigley
12/12/17, 6:00pm
Scott Ammon
Eshoo.SAB@mail.house.gov

I have always been very passionate about social justice and human rights. When I started high school, I wanted to participate in extracurriculars that would allow me to exercise this passion. I joined my city's youth council, and started studying journalism so that I could write for my school's newspaper and produce pieces about injustice and human rights violations. However, I wanted to enact change on a larger scale than my school and local community. So I joined California Congresswoman Anna Eshoo's Student Advisory Board.

After submitting my application and being accepted onto the board, I had no idea what to expect before the first meeting. When I arrived, I was surrounded by a group of students just as passionate as I was. Our meeting was lead by one of the Senior Field Representatives of Congresswoman Eshoo's office. Our project for the year was to choose a topic that we were passionate about, identify a problem, and develop a solution. Each student would then propose this solution to the Congresswoman herself at a board meeting in May.

I immediately began to search for a problem relating to social justice. I settled on fighting for the protection of adult undocumented immigrants. While people are fighting to protect children of undocumented immigrants through DACA and the DREAM Act, adults are being forced to return to their "home countries" after having remained law-abiding people and building a life in the United States. I felt that this was unjust and began to develop a solution to this issue of mass deportation.

Our positions on the board allowed us to utilize computers that had access to government information to help us conduct our research. I hoped that my extensive research and effort on this policy paper would make a significant impact on the Congresswoman.