I yearned for the American dream long before I ever heard the term.
My dad drove an L.A. City bus. My dad could not afford a babysitter, so my little brother and I often rode the bus with him.
There we were, two small children with our feet dangling down from orange plastic seats, sandwiched in between crowds of hard-working people from all walks of life.
We would ride through Chinatown, Japantown, East L.A., and Crenshaw - neighborhoods with their own rhythms and histories.
Little did I realize how much this experience would shape my life and my perspective of the world.
It seemed everyone was in some sort of hustle - hurry to work, to school, or to the market across town where a dollar went further.
Even my dad was in a hustle - working multiple shifts to make ends meet.
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Late one night, while we were sleeping on the seat across from him, my dad drove over a pothole. I woke up suddenly.
“Shannon,” he said, glancing at me in the mirror. “You see how hard I’m working? This is why you have to go to college. And you need to get a scholarship because I can't afford to send you.”
Even at six, I understood what he was really saying: getting an education was the only path available to help me get ahead.
Shortly after, my dad got hurt on the job. He slipped on an oil slick in the depot on a rainy night and hurt his back badly.
Food stamps and Medicaid helped keep our family afloat. Those weren’t abstract policies to us; they were groceries, doctor’s visits, and rent.
Those early years shaped my understanding of economic security. They also planted the question that would guide my life’s work:
How do we design systems where everyone has a fair shot at the American dream?
Like my Dad encouraged me, I hustled to get an education. I got a merit scholarship to U.C. Berkeley for my B.A., to the American University in Cairo for my M.A., and Columbia University for my Ph.D.
My field of study? Sociology.
When I discovered sociology, the world I’d seen from the bus window finally made sense.
The “sociological imagination” gave language to what I’d lived: that biography and history intertwine - that a child on a bus in Los Angeles can attend university not just by her own grit, but because a society invests in her family.
It’s because of the wisdom of generations of Americans before me, who supported safety net programs as investments in our country’s common good, that I am the person I am today.
My professional journey as an applied sociologist: professor, business woman, and government strategist.
As I began my professional career, I dedicated myself to teaching about social change and social movements. I became a professor at East L.A. City College and eventually worked my way up to teaching in the Ivy League at Columbia University.
In the second stage of my career, I became a consultant to help mission-driven organizations turn their visions for social change into reality.
This work deepened my belief that social change requires both strategy and organizational capability.
In 2016, I founded Epic Teams, a consultancy that helps organizations build high performing cultures.
Our motto was to help leaders and teams “deliver the right things, in the right way, and at the right speed for the people they serve.”
Many of our clients, including L’Oreal, Gainsight, Lever, and others, have gone on to successful exits or exceeded their financial goals as a result.
In 2020, when the pandemic hit, I watched our public institutions struggle to deliver in the ways communities needed.
It became clear that the systems shaping people’s lives needed the same organizational clarity and collective intelligence I had spent years helping companies build.
Now in the third part of my career, I work to improve the organizational performance of the public sector.
From 2022 to early 2025, I served as Senior Advisor to both the Chief Data Scientist at the White House and the Chief Data Officer at the U.S. Department of Commerce.
I led the development of the FY25-28 Department of Commerce Data Strategy, co-founded the U.S. Tech Policy Network, and convened interagency communities of practice to advance data-driven federal program performance.
Today, I lead two complementary organizations: the Civic Wisdom Foundation - a nonprofit building data products to strengthen the collective intelligence of state and local governments - and Civic Wisdom Labs, a consulting and training firm dedicated to building high-performance public-sector cultures.
Lastly, I continue to teach about the importance of social movements as a Senior Fellow in the U.C. Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy.
My most recent course, Agile Policymaking for Improving Household Economic Security, tracks the last 100 years of movement-building for establishing the suite of safety net programs we have today.
Across every chapter of my career - teaching, consulting, and public service - my purpose has stayed the same: to strengthen the systems that allow people, like the riders on my dad’s bus, to move toward opportunity.
