More than Ready by Cecilia Munoz

Author:Cecilia Munoz [Muñoz, Cecilia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2020-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

Find People Who Inspire You

(No Pedestals Allowed)

Once you allow yourself to understand heroes as normal people, and even to see the hero in yourself, it gets easier to see them all around you. When you’re younger, it can be useful to find people with more life experience than you who can serve as mentors, models, and guides. That has remained true for me as I have gotten older, but I also find that I am drawing inspiration from my younger colleagues as well, discovering qualities in them that I aspire to, and finding comfort in knowing that the generations coming up behind me are better than we ever were.

Take for example my friend and colleague Lorella Praeli. She was born in Peru, and at the age of two had a devastating accident that left her without a leg. Her parents brought her to the US for treatments and over time decided to make their lives here. From the age of ten she grew up in Connecticut, excelling in school even as she endured bullying because of her ethnicity and her disability. That bullying turned her into an advocate; out of that adversity, she found her voice.

I got to know Lorella when she was a young advocate for United We Dream, the organization that brings together immigrants like her, who came to the US as children, grew up here, and often didn’t learn that they were not Americans until they tried to get a driver’s license or apply to college. Her job involved holding the Obama administration’s feet to the fire, making sure we were doing everything we could to pass an immigration reform bill or adopt other policies that protected Dreamers and other immigrants. I suppose that means we could have felt like adversaries, because she was pushing, and I was often the administration representative being pushed. But we both wanted the same things, respected each other, and understood that although each of us played very different roles in the conversation about immigration policy, each of our roles was important. If we worked together, we could make progress. I grew to admire Lorella as someone who could be true to herself and to the community she was serving, while also being strategic and tactical, doing everything she can to get to the result she is after for the people she serves. Her compass is set; you can see it.

Lorella’s talents were so visible that Hillary Clinton chose her to lead the Latino vote program for her presidential campaign. This put her into the tough world of politics at the very highest level, where she had to work at breakneck speed, make herself heard and understood by campaign veterans who knew a lot about politics but didn’t always know what she knew about her own community, and stay true to her compass. Had the Clinton campaign succeeded, Lorella would likely have landed a significant job in the new administration. Instead, after doing extraordinary work for the campaign, she joined the staff of the ACLU, where she led their immigration policy and campaigns team at a challenging time.

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