President, Board of Directors
Marqueia is a social worker and the Executive Director at The Greater Kansas City Coalition to End Homelessness. Hailing from Los Angeles, California, home to one of the largest year-round homeless populations in the U.S., she recognizes that homelessness is, at its core, an urgent crisis for everyone experiencing it and a moral crisis for communities that are charged with ending it– often without a roadmap, adequate resources, or the political and public will to effectively do so. These sentiments have been a driving force in her personal and professional endeavors because to her, access to safe, dignified, affordable, accessible housing is a cornerstone of human rights and social justice. She believes in the primacy of housing as the thing that supports all other human goals, dreams, and aspirations and that housing is something that while so basic and essential, has in American society become a complicated, painful, and divisive topic. For her, anti-homelessness work is the only way to truly undo the historical transgressions that have relegated far too many to the fringes of society, the skids, the places that are far too easily forgotten or ignored. She is motivated to do the work she does because she believes housing is an essential human right and because she measures a society by the multitude of ways in which it either uplifts or diminishes all its people and believes esta society can do better. As a homeless advocate, Marqueia’s goal is to share her insights, her ideas, and her truth to engage community partners in open and honest dialogue about the socioeconomic and sociopolitical realities that drive homelessness and real-world strategies that will end it.
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