The International Examiner is proud to honor Maria Abando with a Community Voice Award (CVA) for Leadership in Community. Please join us in-person, on October 23, 2025, to celebrate her and other community leaders.
Editor’s note: The article had previously associated Abando’s work with Whose Streets! Our Streets! with her work with Raise the Rage Renton. The correction has been made.
Growing up on the east side of Tacoma, community organizer Maria Abando was raised surrounded by diverse immigrant populations, with a lot of neighbors who spoke English as a second language. A big part of Abando’s advocacy and community work comes from growing up “100% Black and 100% Filipino” and the ways she used to feel that she didn’t fit in. Her mom is African American and was raised in Tacoma, but her dad immigrated to the United States from the Philippines. By embracing her identity, Abando now does not see herself as half of each culture, but knows fully that she belongs in both communities.
“Part of what I want to do in my time on this Earth is helping people make sure that they can thrive and that they can find their belonging,” Abando said.
Presently, Abando is the assistant director at the Making Connections Program at the University of Washington Alene Moris Women’s Center which supports girls, women and people of all gender identities through education programs for students, staff, faculty and community members. In her staff position, she sees a lot of similar themes that she struggled with growing up, including working with students that feel out of place in university settings. Abando believes that even though higher institutions of learning were not traditionally made for marginalized groups, that’s the same reason they need to make space for themselves within it.
“If you want to get into higher education, nothing should stop you from that,” she said. “You can leave the spaces that you occupy a little bit better than when you came into them.”
Abando sees a lot of passion and commitment in prospective students. She wants to encourage them to enjoy the journey and not hone in on the destination.
From her personal experience as what she calls “a free lunch kid” and being a first-generation college student, Abando had thought her only ticket into college was through track and field. But that dream was scrapped by an injury in her senior year.
Thanks to good SAT scores and writing, she was able to get into UW where she earned a Bachelor’s degree of Science in Biology, but she wasn’t sure what to do with it. Abando struggled to find community before getting a campaign job and becoming politically engaged.
Abando’s activism work is motivated by increasing equity in education, health, economic and environmental justice, as well as fighting for the liberation of marginalized communities everywhere.
“Seeing [students] work hard, graduate and get them to their colleges: my gosh, every single time, that is the biggest accomplishment,” she said.
Abando is also an organizer with Whose Streets? Our Streets!, a BIPOC-led group that works to shift power back to communities most impacted by decisions on safety, transportation, and climate. They have increased equity by advocating for policies that: reduce speeding in the city by expanding who gets warnings; strengthen protections to ensure that ticket revenues go directly toward efforts to reduce speeding; prioritize physical street improvements before placing cameras; and add some data privacy protections.
Abando’s parents were influential in her eventual role as a community organizer. Although her parents wouldn’t consider their involvement within their communities as “organizing,” Abando said they were always bringing people together or giving back to those who needed it most.
Her mom volunteered and worked at Tacoma Public Schools as a family advocate for low-income families in Head Start, a federal program from the Department of Health and Human Services which provides support for qualified children and their families.
Abando grew up volunteering with her mom at the local food bank and picked up donated shoes from Payless Shoes for local children. Her mom would give the shoes in a school lunch paper bag so the children wouldn’t suspect it to be anything different; later, they would discover they had a new pair of shoes.
“I loved it because I could imagine the joy and excitement for a little kid to get light up or princess shoes, when they didn’t have much, and it just inspired me to continue to give back,” Abando said.
In middle school, Abando was part of the South End Neighborhood Student Advisory Committee, which advised the Tacoma City Council on what they wanted to see in their community. During her time here, Abando remembers adopting a street and taking care of it by picking up trash or advocating for a former gas station to be turned into a park for children to be able to play in.
“I just felt like the organizing and advocacy just kept on coming,” she said.
At one point, a fire burned parts of her middle school library. Abando made a speech at her local rotary club, in order to raise money to replace some of the materials lost in the fire, such as computers and books. She remembers the members being much older and whiter than those of her community, but this only pushed Abando to advocate for her community even more.
“Once you know something that can help your community, you’ve got to share that with other people,” Abando said. “Lift as we climb.”
Abando said she feels incredibly honored to receive a Community Voice Award from International Examiner, since she’s heard and met some of the previous awardees.
“I just appreciate that there are moments and opportunities like this with the International Examiner because knowing all these incredible women, they’re not searching for it. They’re not looking for awards, recognition; it’s just the community recognizing them,” Abando said.
She wants to continue her work helping youth make connections at the UW Women’s Center and to advocate for communities through Whose Streets? Our Streets!
“I realized that [organizing efforts] might end, but the community that you build along the way: those can last forever,” said Abando. “The impact that we could have just in connecting with each other… especially when policies or systems fail, [as] community members, we have each other.”
