Celebrating AANHPI Heritage Month with Maria Luz Torre 

In honor of AANHPI Heritage Month, we’re highlighting  Maria Luz Torre, Children’s Council’s Parent Voices Organizer and her over 30 years of service.  Maria has organized and fought relentlessly over the past three decades, helping to win billions of dollars in child care funding and turning parents into powerful advocates. “We fought and saved 10 billion in proposed cuts,” says Torre. 

Maria is driven by a Filipino concept called Bayanihan Spirit: the idea that a community works together towards a common goal to help one another without expecting anything in return. 

Maria came of age during the People Power Revolution in the Philippines, graduated from law school and spent her early career as an advocacy coordinator fighting for forest dwellers, fishing villages and urban communities at the intersection of environmental justice and conservation.  

When she arrived in San Francisco, she found that struggling parents of young children needed community: that became the seed of Parent Voices. As a mother who had faced the same challenges, Maria understood their experiences firsthand and that shared understanding became the foundation of trust she built with the parents she organized alongside. 

That trust translated directly into action. Parent Voices formally took shape when Children’s Council received seed funding from the Jennifer Altman Foundation for child care. Patty Siegel, Children’s Council’s Executive Director at the time, convend Resource & Referral Directors and parents from across the state to determine the use of these funds. Together, they decided to establish key chapters in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Sacramento and Santa Barbara. While Resource & Referral staff initially hosted the project, it became clear that the program required dedicated organizers to truly thrive. Children’s Council then secured funding from the Mimi and Peter Haas Foundation to hire dedicated staff, giving Parent Voices the infrastructure it needed to grow.

There have been many victories since Parent Voices began. When a Parent Voices child died of asthma in 2004, Maria used her grief to organize. Across the country, approximately 145 children under 18 die from asthma every year, a number that drives the urgency behind this work. The result was Asthma Relief for Kids (ARK), a partnership with the American Lung Association that led to emergency protocols being posted in every SFUSD preschool classroom and asthma training for teachers city wide. The campaign also earned a U.S. Environmental Protection Award. 

Maria, along with then Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, helped recertify San Francisco’s Children’s Fund, fought off over ten billion dollars in proposed state child care cuts and when the recession came in 2008, Parent Voices brought back funding from one to two billion dollars within two years. Then came the passing of Baby Prop C: Parent Voices, along with the San Francisco ECE  Advocacy Coalition and the SEIU Union, secured dedicated funding for early childhood care in San Francisco through a commercial rent tax by phone-banking, canvassing and visibility work every day for three months on a $15,000 budget.   

As AANHPI Heritage Month invites reflection on what Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities have contributed to American life, Maria wants people to understand that immigrants carry with them a fierce desire to contribute. “We come here wanting to succeed…we bring our talents, enrich the culture, do work that other people may not want to do.”  

To the emerging leaders just starting out in the field, especially someone from the AANHPI community, Maria’s advice is to “Be true to yourself. Keep learning, do your research, make a commitment and beware because once you are in it, it is not easy to let go.”