How can this reality be the American “dream” I idealized. To be born into poverty. To be disenfranchised. To attend the largest public high school in LA with a 70 percent dropout rate. A high school with more Army recruiters than college counselors. And yet…to succeed despite the odds. To be the first in my family to graduate from high school and get to college. To get a law degree. To break every glass barrier in my profession. That journey, indeed, my life…has been about defiance and conflicting realities.

And one might have thought, achieving a certain amount of success, that my sense of belonging and agency would be secured. But unfortunately, self-determination does not necessarily equate to self-realization. This is a shared condition for those of us who have emerged intact from a background of poverty and discrimination. We seek to belong. But when we arrive to places of power and prestige, we aren’t sure what belonging actually means. What are we aspiring to? Do we really want to belong if it means leaving certain parts of us and our community behind?

And this was how I spent a great deal of my time after graduating from law school and signing on to big law: trying to convince others that I belonged, only to realize that if I must self-consciously think about being a whole person and convince others of my worth, my wholeness was an act of self-preservation, not self-realization. So I had to ask: How do I truly bring my whole self to my profession and, in the act of doing so, encourage others to do the same? Are there people like me who want to do the same, who understand this instinctively and implicitly?

That brings me to this evening. I found those people. Or, more accurately, I found my tribe. Ramneek Saini, Ontario Smith, Chris Torres and, of course, Kira Conlon—we have decided to build this new way of working and serving. A way of being whole. We are building Somos with a foundation of rebels who may have started as outsiders and have struggled to find a place inside the circle. A group that knows the only way stay in the circle is to bring others in with them.

We are not a firm who will bring in a bevy of consultants to solve problems of diversity and equity. We do not need other experts to tell us how to build sustainable cities where all people can flourish, to find solutions to urban problems that don’t marginalize already disenfranchised people. We are the diversity. We are the experts. My partners and the brilliant people we have hired will use that lived experience and first-in-class expertise to draw those who for generations have lived outside the circle, INTO the circle. This is our fervent hope. Our American Dream.

I have often turned to art and literature for meaning. (And I hope you experience the incredible art pieces in our Somos office upstairs this evening.) I think of the philosopher and feminist Audre Lorde. Lorde embraced her own multiple identities and sought to create community by doing the hard work of understanding the identities of others who were different than her. “What we must do,” Lorde wrote, “is to commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities.”

This is my fervent hope—and the hope of my partners and colleagues at Somos—that we can extend the circle to others without pushing others out. That through hard work, sacrifice and faith we can do BIG WORK we are proud of and improve the lives of others. That we can draw on our own multiple identities, our own knowledge, our strengths, to make the world a more humane, fulfilling, and joyous place for all—especially for those who have been systematically denied a place within that circle, denied the blessings of a decent life, acceptance, and love.

I said earlier that in the past I struggled with the many conflicting narratives of my life; that the constant codeswitching was exhausting. I think I have come to an understanding that those contradictions are to be celebrated not reconciled and explained into nothingness. They are our most precious asset. Our superpower.

In the final analysis, this is our choice. We can choose to contract the circle or expand the circle. We can be exhausted or exalted. We can build the world we hope to live in one day or simply settle for the world we have. We know if we do this right, it will get easier and possible for more of us to do what we are doing at Somos. So, it is high time we take the risk, try new ideas, operate on faith, take the personal and the political—like Audre Lorde said—and build different tools for a different house—that to save the world we have to build it anew.

Thank you for the love you manifest tonight. Let us go and build something together for LA.