Alumni Spotlight: Tatiana Brown, MPA ’24

Like many public policy students, Tatiana Brown did not initially intend on studying public policy. Brown, this year’s Hubert G. Locke Diversity award recipient, grew up in Vienna, Virginia, a suburb of Washington D.C., and though she was raised in the shadow of the nation’s capital, she was not exposed to the important role public policy has to play in communities.

She instead pursued a degree in biomedical engineering from the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. It was there that she began noticing problems that weren’t present in her hometown.

“It was so hard to vote,” Brown said. “I had just voted the year prior at home and of course it was no problem at all. And now I’m going to three different polling places that are all closing, and I don’t know why. I also didn’t have access to a grocery store. I had to go to a corner market without fresh produce.”

Brown realized that pursuing a degree in biomedical engineering wouldn’t help reach her ultimate goal: helping people. So, she switched to studying medical anthropology and started doing public health research and working on the Virginia Medicaid Expansion project. While working with communities that, for various reasons, didn’t have access to health care, Brown grew frustrated with the lack of empathy in the system for these communities. She decided in her final year of her undergrad that she wanted to focus her post-grad career on public health.

“I definitely knew coming out of my final year in my undergrad that I wanted to get a master’s of public health, and I wanted a degree in public policy because I felt like that was the toolkit I had no idea about,” said Brown. “I knew that policy was really important to what I wanted to do, which was create long-lasting change and create better realities for communities of color, and I didn’t have the skill set to do it.”

In 2021, Brown found her way to the UW and pursued a dual master’s in public health and public policy. She was drawn to the Evans School because not many “programs are outspoken about the need to center justice.” While at Evans, she has held positions on the Equity and Inclusion Council and the Dean’s Council and has earned recognition from Evans faculty and fellow students. Additionally, Brown is the associate program director for the Campus Sustainability Fund and is the youth representative on the Washington State Environmental Justice Council.

Brown’s time spent at the Evans School and UW broadly has affirmed her belief in the role of policy to create a sustainable society and has prepared her to take her learnings outside the university. “I’ve actively been able to practice, and it has given me a lot more gratitude for what we actually learn,” Brown said. “Public policy is one of the few disciplines that is so pervasively connected to community well-being. Policy determines who is actively engaged in their governance, our built environment, who gains access to healthcare and a long life, the presence of public goods like mass transit, and how wealth is distributed in our nation. It determines our ability to build a sustainable society that promotes people over profit. We hold the power to determine our future and that begins with radically envisioning a different for our communities.”

Now that she has graduated with a Masters of Public Administration and a Masters of Public Health, Brown will remain in her role at the Campus Sustainability Fund and intends to continue working on ways for communities of color to engage in co-governance, developing models for localized regenerative economy, and other methods to improve community well-being.