Attorney climbs from poverty, abuse to become social justice advocate

The podcast Guiding Growth: Conversations with Community Leaders from the Gilbert Chamber of Commerce, event and meeting venue Modern Moments and the Gilbert Independent/yourvalley.net explores the human journey of leaders. There are stories of humility, triumph, roadblocks, and lessons learned. This partial transcript of the most recent podcast with Pearlette Ramos has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Pearlette Ramos is a lawyer, transformational leader, social justice advocate, and entrepreneur with more than 25 years’ experience in activism, change and strategic management, and DEI consultation.

Born in Youngstown, Ohio, and raised in the housing projects, Ramos’ childhood home was poverty- stricken and riddled with substance abuse, domestic abuse and untreated mental illness. Due to the trauma, she fled her parents’ home when she was 15 years old. Within 12 months she was pregnant, married and a high school dropout. During her 20s, she struggled as a single mom who worked three jobs at a time just to make ends meet. These challenges prompted her to attend college, then law school school, where she dreamt of changing the laws and systems that disproportionately impacted women and children.

Ramos serves as the senior director for the Office of Justice and Civil Rights for the Washington Department of Social and Health Services, the largest state agency with more than 17,000 employees serving approximately 2 million clients. She also leads Pearlette Ramos LLC as well as Sisters Talk About Race, an Arizona nonprofit she co-founded, which is committed to connecting, educating and activating women to end systemic racism and ensure justice.

Ramos is producing her first social impact film, Three (Extra)Ordinary Women , which explores the life stories of three women of color who collectively overcame poverty, abuse, systemic racism, and political occupation as they brave their biggest physical obstacle yet— climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.

Let's start at the beginning and cover a little bit of your childhood and some of the challenges that you faced and who was there along the way and what'd that look like for you?

I have always had a fierce desire to make things right. Fairness, justice was in my heart and probably because as a little girl I saw so many things that seemed unjust and unfair, and because of that I became a lawyer. And so it's been an interesting journey. I am 54 years old, and that amazes me like this. Time flies by so quickly. And when I was 15, I left home because of the domestic violence in our household and that had turned to child abuse. And I used to lie about my age because I was ashamed because I dropped out of high school and ended up getting married and having a baby by the time I was 16. And my daughter died when she was 4 months old. And so I'd had quite a bit of trauma as a young person, but didn't know the language for trauma. It was just how life was. And so at 54, it's like, “Oh my God, where's this time gone? It's flown by.

What does life look like after you drop out? And I guess I'm curious how you eventually find your way out of this. Are there people along the way that help you through that journey?

Well, I'm going to start with my mother. My mother was a Christian, very devout Baptist, but she dibbled and dabbled in a number of different religions. And because of her faith and dibbling and dabbling, I dibbled and dabbled because I'm the youngest of five children and her only daughter. But because of her passion for Christ, I went to church a lot, and I sang in the church choir, and I remember singing the song, “This Little Light of Mine,” love that song still. I sang that song with heart as a child and a part of what helped guide my life was my connection, I'm going to say, to God. But as I've evolved over the years, it was my connection to myself. I've always had a sense of my inner direction. And God, even when I appear to be going off path, I felt a centering within myself. I always felt like it's going to be OK even during those times. So I think it was a combination of faith and hope and a deep desire to fulfill what felt like and what still feels like is mine to fulfill.

When did you recognize that you were an advocate?

When I was the only one in my household willing to speak up against stepfather in his madness.

Do you feel like, I mean, did you truly at that time realize what it was you were doing?

No. All I know is there was a lot of peer pressure by my mother and my brother to be quiet.

How do you go from your teenage years and your young adulthood to finding your transition into law school? And how do you convince yourself that that's something that you can accomplish coming from the circumstances?

Well, I made the decision to go to law school after I was working three jobs in North Carolina. So I had a number of things happen between my leaving home and going to law school. One of those was I had gone to college, and I was the first person in my family to graduate from college. And I thought pearly gates of heaven would open when I went to college. I would get the best job and make tons of money. I went to Methodist College. It's now Methodist University in North Carolina, and there were no pearly gates. And I am going to say I struggled, which is why I ended up working three jobs. But one of those jobs was for the Raleigh Housing Authority. So I was in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I was working in a program at the time that was focused on helping women become self-sufficient.

So I knew that I wanted to do work around women's rights and advocacy. I didn't want to be a lawyer. I didn't even conceive of being a lawyer at that time. And so I was volunteering partly at homeless shelters and domestic violence shelters. I was rape crisis counselor at the time, but my full-time job was as a program specialist. And I was responsible for going into public housing developments, helping to remove barriers that mostly women, although there could have been men who have households there, helping them become self-sufficient. So removing barriers, providing life skill classes, offering childcare, offering support. And I encountered mostly women who really didn't have hope.

I grew up in public housing as well in the projects as we called it in Youngstown. And a part of my advocacy was, “Hey, I relate to your experience. I grew up here too and I made it out and so can you.” And the women would look at me and say, “No, actually I cannot make it out.” And that was astonishing because you heard me say, I have always had a sense of faith and hope in my life, and I think I projected that out onto others and thought they had it too. And this was the first time I encountered adults, women who were like, “No, this is my life. This is it.” And it angered me. And then like any person who's self-righteous, I tried to convince them that they were wrong,and I was right. They really could. And that didn't work out really well. And so there was a combination of those experiences along with my working three jobs.

By that point I was a single mother, so I had gotten married, gotten divorced, and I had my daughter who at the time was about 2 years old, and I came to the conclusion that how I was living was not sustainable. And I took an interest inventory test. And that test said I had similar interests as judges and lawyers years. And once I took the test, I was like, how much do they make? Let's do this.

I wanted to go to law school to actually change the system. It wasn't necessarily to practice law. It was to become a congress person because at my research at the time indicated that many of the people who were in Congress were lawyers.

You have a lot of travel on your journey. Tell us about some of the most unique adventures you've been on.

I'm going to start by saying I love this planet. It is alive, and I feel the presence of my own peace in the great outdoors. That was an evolutionary process. I grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, where it was flat, not necessarily beautiful, and it was my desire to explore. That started beyond the journey. I am still very much excited and passionate about the next place.

So what are some places?

Well, I want to say every place, but I'll start with the most beautiful. I absolutely love mountain ranges, and so I'll say Norway. I have a thing for fjords. And the reality that glaciers carved in these inlets, it's just strikingly beautiful. I loved Patagonia, both the Chilean and the Argentina side for the similar reasons. Very beautiful with glaciers and mountain ranges and water, and it's amazing.

I did go to Antarctica for my 50th birthday. I was 49, and that closed out all of the continents for me, which was a life goal. And I was scared to go, I don't like to be cold. I was also concerned about the Drake passage because it's very rocky and people have trouble crossing the Drake passage, but it was an unnecessary fear. I was fine. I mean, I got sick, but everybody gets sick. That's a part of it. I shouldn't say everybody, but many people get sick, and it was the best trip I think of my life.

It was a pivotal time turning 50. And a part of the journey for me, the journey into myself, was what do I want to create in the second half of my life? I mean, probably the second half of my life passed five to 10 years ago. But for me, the inner conversation about that was at 49, turning 50, I was in a dialogue about the first 50 years I was striving to become something, striving to achieve things, striving to realize my dreams, to make peace with myself, to raise my kids, to be engaged in the community. And it was very much goal-driven. And I felt a calling within myself to really shift that in the second half of my life and to focus more on responding to the call of life and being in tune and in touch with myself to both hear, to be open enough to hear the call with this idea that life was living me as opposed to my living life, or maybe it's a combined journey.

I know you're working on a documentary. What is this documentary all about and what can we look forward to?

Well, the film is called Three (Extra)Ordinary Women. And it tells the story of three women who experienced childhood violence and who made meaning of it in a way that focused on their resilience as children, as little kids. And it became fuel for them, for the women they would become. And they tell their individual stories as they climb Mount Kilimanjaro, which they did. And I'm one of all three women in 2021, and it's a film, but it's also a social impact documentary. The goal of it is to normalize the conversation about trauma, because so often people have fear and shame and guilt maybe around the things that happen to them, and it can inhibit them in their lives. I want to normalize that because successful people have had struggles too.

Some of the greatest leaders have overcome some pretty incredible trauma and loss in life.

So often I think that there's this narrative around success all the time. You see the obsession with success and what does it look like? Which is fine. I have no problem with success. However, that's not normal. Things aren't great all the time. And so the purpose of the film is to normalize the conversation about trauma. It is to help focus people on the great outdoors. It's a combination of engaging in sisterhood because we're obviously three women and it's telling our individual stories, but the intention of it is to connect with self, to connect with other, to connect with land or the planet.

You are connected to several charities and organizations and community. You look for community-impacted ways to give back, and so I just wanted to open the floor for you to share any of those that are near dear to your heart and how you engage in those.

Where my passion lies currently is with OneAZ, which is a credit union in Arizona. Credit unions were created to help bridge the financial divide for people. And because of the structural barriers, they haven't always fulfilled on that promise. And I've been a member of a credit union for 30, 40 years, but about four years ago, I decided to run for a seat on the board. I'm currently actually the vice chairperson and the governance chair. And what that essentially means is we're responsible for our members’ dollars, and we have a number of initiatives that we're working through to help bridge the financial gap for communities.

One of the other organizations that I serve as the president of this year is the Arizona Black Bar. ABB was created really to help further justice across Arizona and to uplift the members who are a part of ABB. You don't have to be an African American to be a member of ABB, but most of our members are, and there are still systemic barriers that exist that negatively impact not just lawyers, although those barriers do impact lawyers, but also those we serve. I have a number of other organizations that a member of and volunteer with and have, but those are two of my primary passions.