School was a happy place for me. I ended up going to a good college, even though my high school wasn’t particularly outstanding. But there was a library, and everywhere I’ve gone in my life, the library was the place where I felt most happy.

I know your father was a military pilot and died in a plane collision. How did losing him so early affect the family?

My father died the day before his 31st birthday, when I was 3. My mom remarried, so we had a blended family growing up. My stepfather was a high school guidance counselor, and my mother was a substitute teacher for a long time.

It’s quite a world-shaping event when you lose a parent in a tragic accident. All of us, my siblings and I, grew up knowing the impermanence of this existence. And while that’s very difficult for a child to make sense of, it’s the greatest blessing of my life, that I understand the temporal nature of our existence deeply, and the fragility of everything that we witness. To have the gift of the day is a very real and profound thing.

What was your first job?

If we wanted money for anything, we had to earn it. My brothers all had paper routes, and I inherited one of them when I was really young. And then I tried everything that a child can do and get paid for it. On snow days, we’d shovel people’s driveways. I was a babysitter. I was a lifeguard. I was a swim instructor. When I turned 16, I first was a bus girl and then a waitress. And then for college, I had to use every source of revenue I could find: loans, scholarships, work-study and more waitressing.

How did you first get involved with social welfare issues?

When I moved to California from New York, I lived in Palo Alto, which is right next door to East Palo Alto. It was a situation where there was one side of the community that was low income, and it has entirely different human outcomes than the other side of the town that might as well be hundreds of miles away. We know about this kind of dichotomy that exists in American cities, and Palo Alto and East Palo Alto are as divided and separated as any of these.

The air quality in East Palo Alto is worse than anywhere around. The land is poisoned. A lot of the Silicon Valley fabricators have used it as their dumping ground over the years. There’s arsenic in the water table.