By Jordan Dove, 2025 CLA Intern
It feels surreal to have reached this point: the end. It’s been nine weeks of listening, speaking, learning, and acting, and I feel very privileged to be here.
At Senator Ben Allen’s office, I was able to take on the important work of the API Rainbow Coalition, a network of API organizations and elected officials in Southern California working to defend limitations on trans rights by the federal administration. As a trans Filipino American myself, being able to exercise my power in this way was both an exciting professional opportunity and a meaningful personal undertaking. I feel proud to have had a role in this project, and I am grateful to have been entrusted with this by my District Director, Sam Liu.
I am tremendously grateful to have had a wonderful supervisor in field representative Sam Gallegos and to have found both a friend and steady leader in district office staff member Paige Natoli. In working with Senator Allen’s team, I have felt welcomed into their work and empowered not just to learn but to have a voice in office operations. Understanding the complications of wildfire recovery has been a particularly eye-opening process and I leave with a better ability to navigate community response networks.
At CAUSE itself, I have been able to absorb a diversity of perspectives from political consultants like Rob Chua, advocates and organizers like Godfrey Plata, artists like Jason Pereira, and academics like Dr. Natalie Masuoka. These voices and the weight they carry have clarified the lens through which I approach my own advocacy efforts. In being welcomed into this community, I have joined a network of AANHPIs who are civically engaged, opinionated, and ready to act. This has been one of the greatest benefits of this program. The ability to have difficult discussions with those in the room is a privilege I don’t take lightly, and my access to affirmative mentorship has already had a profound impact.
CLA is so transformative not just because of its guest speakers, workshops, and programming, but because as interns for CAUSE, we are temporary shadows of the staff. Nancy, Heather, Andrea, and Coby have been incredible forces to witness rise to this political moment with compassion and steadiness. Andrea has been an inspiring leader by example, and it feels fortuitous for our time at CAUSE to have coincided with her appointment to the LA City Charter Commission. I look forward to watching their work continue.
This experience would not have been what it was without the friendship of my cohort. All fourteen of them have offered much-needed levity and commiseration as we’ve walked parallel paths through CLA and I feel confident that these are relationships I will lean on for a long time to come. Midway through our time here, one of us described our community as ‘consciously inclusive’, and I continue to appreciate that intention.
As I move on from CLA, I will take with me renewed purpose. I will return to the spaces I occupy with a call to action—the commitment to ‘making noise’ I shouldered from my first day here. I have carried it with me to my last.