Rhonna-Rose was a key part of confirming my deep-seated passion for policy work and public service. She is definitely a hard worker and is capable of doing anything that is suitable for the cause. I’d recommend her for any leadership position.

There is a kind of woman the world does not always recognize right away.

She is not loud about what she carries. She does not need to be. You see it in how she moves through a room. In how she listens before she speaks. In how she has never once walked away from a hard thing simply because it was hard.

Rhonna-Rose Akama-Makia is that woman.

She was born in the American South to parents who crossed oceans so that she could stand on solid ground. And she understood, even as a child, that the ground was not solid for everyone. That some people were doing everything right and still sinking. That the systems meant to catch them were sometimes the very things pulling them under.

She could have looked away. Many people do.

She did not.

Instead she went in. Into the organizations. Into the communities. Into the rooms where decisions get made about people who are never invited to sit at the table. She learned how power works. She learned where it breaks. She learned what it costs a family when a document goes missing, when a worker has no one to call, when the law moves forward and leaves someone behind.

And then she built. Because that is what she does. She builds.

She builds systems that protect people. She builds trust in communities that have been given every reason to distrust. She builds pathways where there were only walls.

Now she is walking toward the law. Not because she is new to this fight. She has been in this fight her entire life. She is walking toward the law because she knows that love without power has limits. That witness without tools is not enough. That the people she comes from do not just need someone who understands their struggle.

They need someone who can stand in a room on their behalf and make the room listen.