Talk Story with Lindsay Pacheco

Lindsay Pacheco is an AAUW Honolulu 2022 Academic Undergraduate Scholarship awardee. She will be speaking about earning a social work degree while working at the State of Hawaii Office of the Governor as a Homeless Community Development Specialist.

Lindsay Pacheco Bio:

Lindsay Pacheco is someone who has 7 years of lived experience as a houseless woman who resided in the Kaka’ako Park area at one point in time, before the large encampment was initially swept from the area in late 2019. Since then, Lindsay has been able to get housed on a Housing First housing voucher and has been housed for 3 years now. Since getting housed, she been able to get clean & sober from previous drug use, re-enrolled into college, graduated in the Spring of 2022 with an AA in Liberal Arts, and is now currently working on a Bachelor’s Degree in Social Work. On top of it all, Lindsay is now employed full time as the Homelessness Community Development Specialist in the Statewide Office on Homelessness & Housing Solutions, formerly known as the Governor’s Coordinator on Homelessness Office.

Lindsay is also the co-founder for the O’ahu Lived Experience Council (OLEC) which is a speaker’s bureau of all houseless individuals from 4 different encampments throughout the island of O’ahu. The overall goal of OLEC is to lift up the voices of our un-housed communities as we work together to have the voices of more folks with lived experiences be included at the discussion tables of service providers, government officials, and anyone else who is willing to learn more about the realities of houselessness from those experiencing it first-hand.

For more information on OLEC please visit: www.ourvoicescounttoo.com.