Growing up in Roxbury, Andrea’s life was filled with instability. When Andrea was eight months old, she lost her mother to a car accident while going to visit her father in prison. She and her brothers bounced around – living with relatives and sometimes in foster care – until her father got out of prison when she was eight years old, and she met him for the first time.
Andrea and her family relied on public housing and food assistance while her grandmother struggled with alcoholism. Her two brothers sadly cycled in and out of the prison system. She lost her twin brother Andre, when he passed away while in the custody of the Department of Corrections as a pre-trial detainee.
This issue is personal for Andrea, who grew up down the street from the epicenter of Boston’s opioid crisis. But Andrea knows this crisis touches nearly every corner of the Commonwealth, and requires a regional response with a whole host of stakeholders, including those with lived experience, at the table. When it comes to this response, Andrea is committed to looking at more than opioids because she knows that it’s illegal drugs harming communities, and all too often, harming our communities of color.