For 25 years, I answered the call when a child in Los Angeles County was placed in imminent danger. That work taught me what human rights look like at the moment they fail a person most in need of them. I am a retired child-welfare investigator, a technologist, and a civil-society leader at the United Nations since 2017. Today I serve as co-chair of the UNA-USA Human Rights Affinity Group, where we educate, advocate, and mobilize across the full spectrum of human rights (civil, political, economic, social, and cultural), and I lead the content for this website. My work rests on a single conviction: that technology can be built to be safe, ethical, and equitable, in service of the public good and not only the profitable.
Frontline experience
I am, myself, a former foster youth from Los Angeles County. For 25 years I served as a Children’s Social Worker and Emergency Responder at LA County DCFS, assessing the safety of more than 7,000 children in cases of abuse and neglect across all 88 cities of the county. Earlier, I served in the U.S. Air Force (1986–2004), reaching Staff Sergeant. It was in the gap between the military’s digital infrastructure and the paper files I later carried at DCFS that my career-defining question took shape: what if technology were built to serve vulnerable communities, not just profitable ones?
Building technology for the public good
I built the ERCP Child Abuse Referral Data System and the SNAP court app, and I founded Humanistic Technologies. I have taken first place in civic-tech hackathons at MIT (with Harvard), in Silicon Valley, and beyond. I hold a B.S. in Computer Information Systems (DeVry, Magna Cum Laude) and an M.A. in Social Work (CSU Long Beach). The systems analyst and the social worker are both people I bring to the same table on every problem.
Where I am focused now
At UNA-USA, I am advancing a human-rights agenda built on three strategic pillars: child welfare, aligned with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child; mental health, centered on community and rural models that honor lived experience; and technology, aligned with the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies and the promise of equitable Digital Public Infrastructure. Child welfare is where I began, but my work in human rights doesn’t stop there.
Roles and recognition
I serve as Co-Chair of the UNA-USA Human Rights Affinity Group; as a Governing Councilor of APHA-HIIT; as Technology and Data Science Analyst for the California Critical Incidents Citizen Review Panel; and as UNA-USA San Francisco delegate for the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Along the way, my work has been recognized with the President’s Lifetime Achievement Award (The White House, 2023), and with first-place honors at MIT Hack Medicine (2023) and Hack the Patriarchy (2017).
I work alongside Lady Tee Thompson, my mentor and advisor at UNA-USA, and I build this website with Daniel Romo, my technologist and partner in it. Everything here is built toward one end: that every person gets the dignity, safety, and opportunity to build a life on their own terms, not on the terms circumstance handed them.
Empowerment through technology, ~ Ruby