I am a 5th generation Arizonan, and take great pride in the roles that my family had in the formation of the territory of Arizona and then the development of this great state. I was born in a banana republic to rather adventurous parents, and I have chased my hopes and dreams with a determined fierceness, from excursions with my mother through the tributaries of the Amazon River to running (albeit at a cautious and safe distance) with the bulls of San Fermin with my father, I have also joined in all kinds of Pilgrimages around the globe. While I may not have been born in Arizona, I recognize that Arizona has had a deep formative effect on me -- Arizona is home. One of them, anyway. I have embraced Arizona just as I embrace all of life and what it has so graciously given me. Fully and completely! Some of my community visions came from having lived so intimately close to the divide between those who have and those who have not -- those who have wealth and those who experience poverty, those who have formal education and those who do not, those who have experienced joy and those whose lives have been touch by sorrow. Aside from the education I received through life experience, I studied Socio-cultural and Medical Anthropology at Arizona State University (with an emphasis on evolutionary biology) and I am proud to have been the third woman in my family to go through that area of study. I also studied Medicine at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Cumbaya, Ecuador. While there, I focused on community health and worked with a community located high in the Andes to try and understand how traditional beliefs influenced child rearing practices. I finished the study convinced that the stories I heard and observations I made were not of mere superstitions but were, when viewed with wide-angle lenses, snippets of wisdom that had been developed through experience honed over many generations. I have worked with populations that are as varied and as diverse as the world provides and have worked in many arenas from clinical research to youth development and empowerment programs.