Silence filled the classroom as Tijani described escaping from a shooter in his neighborhood. It was 2016 and I was leading a workshop for 7th graders as part of a non-profit organization that I founded called Rising Leaders, Inc. Rising Leaders aims to equip underserved middle school students with professional networks, mentorship, and monthly trainings. In this particular workshop, we worked with students on their personal statements — stories they would one day submit with their college applications. We asked them to think of life experiences that shaped who they are and to connect those experiences to their broader goals. One by one, students in the wealthiest country in the world told stories of surviving multiple shootings, living in homeless shelters, or losing their parents only to go through a traumatic foster system.

If you spend any time with Rising Leaders students, you will see they are brilliant, thoughtful, and mature beyond their years. If you look up their state exam results, you could find that only 5% are meeting state standards for math and 8% are meeting state standards for English.

This is our society’s shameful discrepancy: extremely talented kids, bad life outcomes. What explains this gap? Hearing our students’ personal statements, it was not hard to understand some of the sources of this discrepancy: poverty, trauma, and a dearth of resources and infrastructure in their schools and neighborhoods.

Like Tijani and our other students, I know this dynamic personally growing up in South Seattle. My parents are Ethiopian refugees who gave birth to me in a refugee town in Sudan. When I turned 3, we boarded a plane and flew across the Atlantic to the United States through a resettlement program. Neither of my parents had the opportunity to go to college so they worked minimum-wage, physically demanding jobs in nursing homes. We lived in many of Seattle’s public housing projects, including Rainier Vista and Holly Park. When I was eight, we even lived in a homeless shelter through the Union Gospel Mission. I’ll never forget the feelings of not having a place to call our own, constantly having strangers in our personal space, and losing control over the most basic things like the types of food we were allowed to bring to our room.

But fortunately for me, I have a mother who was relentless about protecting and providing for her children through all this adversity. She worked three jobs at a time to give us everything we needed to survive and thrive, even though that meant she rarely slept. She worked evening and graveyard shifts as a nursing assistant, lifting patients and cleaning up after them, for 16 hours or more every single day just to make basic ends meet. She did this brutal work for decades until both of her knees gave out. She is now disabled.

She gave every ounce of herself so her kids could have a better future and I knew I could not squander that sacrifice.

I tried my absolute hardest at Franklin High School and was able to graduate with honors and enroll at Stanford University. Attending a school like Stanford helped me realize how many of our realities in South Seattle are inequitable and unacceptable in a modern society. It’s unacceptable to grow up with no parents in our household because our single mother had to work double shifts, 7 days a week, only to be one paycheck away from financial ruin. It’s unacceptable to know dozens of young men who have been shot and killed in our neighborhood. It’s unacceptable to have our family and neighbors suffering from mental illnesses with nowhere to go for care. It’s unacceptable for half our family to have asthma because people of color were forced to live in dilapidated, unsanitary army units in segregated and under-resourced parts of the city. Most importantly, it’s unacceptable that many, if not most, of these realities are products of policy decisions.

Once I knew public policy could design despair, I realized it could also design hope. These realizations fueled my drive to pursue public service and fight for poor and working-class families through anti-poverty and anti-racism work. After graduating from Stanford in 2009, I participated in a year-long fellowship program that trains leaders to fight poverty and hunger in the U.S. I spent the first six months in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, where I helped low-income residents get access to fresh food by incorporating produce into local corner stores and food banks. I realized, however, that while food banks offer temporary hunger relief, they do not implement the systemic changes necessary for long-term prosperity.

Seeking to change systems, I moved to Washington, D.C. and worked with policy organizations to advocate for better federal legislation on behalf of low-income citizens. I researched and wrote summaries on Congressional proposals, such as healthcare and tax reform, that aimed to aid the poor.