Alumni Profile: Tannya Benavides
Tannya Benavides sips on an iced dirty chai latte, a necessary caffeine boost after her 5am start that morning. As a congressional candidate for Laredo, Tannya is traveling the state to campaign.
Tannya grew up as the daughter of immigrants in Laredo, but she never thought she’d be moving back there to run for political office. She describes Laredo as a place with few career options because of its poverty levels and proximity to the Mexico border. After graduating high school, most locals get jobs in the government, police force or the oil field. Tannya grew up frustrated living in Laredo where it feels like life is predetermined, but she’s working to change that.
“There’s so much untapped potential,” she says. “We’re more than the statistic that lives in poverty.”
Tannya left her city to go to college at Texas State with a major in Political Science. She took Stelos Founder Bill Poston’s Housley Principled Leadership course and learned how to leverage her experience to become a leader.
“Housley was the first experience that I had where I was working on myself,” she said.
She was working on getting her teaching certificate and was recruited by Teach for America after she graduated in 2015. She taught bilingual elementary in Houston while getting her masters at John Hopkins and working on education policy. This busy but enriching career path gave her the drive to change policies in education and to organize immigrant communities.
Tannya noticed there weren’t adequate resources for her students. The third graders would pass notes in class about their fears of being deported. The immigrant parents and their kids desperately needed support such as language education and citizenship classes. The kids who didn’t have that support were more likely to be suspended and fall further behind in school.
“If we’re so frustrated by policy, why aren’t we coming together to do something about it?” Tannya started asking herself. She joined Organizing Network for Education (ONE Houston), and was able to pass policies banning suspensions for K-2 students.
From then on, Tannya kept organizing community members to give testimonies at council meetings and compiling statistics to change policies in Texas and New York. It was grunt work, but it was the only way to change policies ingrained in the system for decades.
“You have to step out of it to see the system isn’t broken,” Tannya said “It's working exactly how people planned it.”
In her spare time last year, Tannya organized Laredo citizens to oppose the border wall fast tracked by former President Trump. The community fought with her and were able to block the wall in Laredo for now.
“It shifted everything for me,” she said.
Now Tannya is continuing her organizing efforts and hopes to have even more impact as an elected official. You can learn more about her campaign here.