Bold. Dedicated. Remarkable. These are just some of the words community members used when nominating the following capital region leaders who have made significant contributions to Sacramento and beyond.
The Sacramento Bee’s Top 20 Asian American and Pacific Islander Change Makers include judges and lawyers, small business owners and nationally recognized nonprofit and private sector leaders. What they have in common is the ability to activate those around them.
The Change Maker series is a collaboration between The Sacramento Bee’s Equity Lab and the Nehemiah Emerging Leaders Program. The project celebrates pioneers in the Latino, Black and Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.
Mona and the other honorees will be recognized at a Unity Change Makers Celebration, Friday, April 4, 2025, from 5:00 to 8:00 PM at the Sacramento State University Ballroom.
The Bee’s profile of Mona is below.
Rau Mona Tawatao
Legal Director, Equal Justice Society
Rau Mona Tawatao, 63, grew up in largely white Apple Valley where her father, Dr. Manuel Tawatao, relocated to practice as an OB-GYN because the community didn’t have enough health providers.
Her schoolmates couldn’t figure out what Tawatao’s race or ethnicity was. That might not seem all that important, but Tawatao was targeted with racial slurs intended to demean Asian Americans and with epithets typically reserved for Latino and African Americans.
Fortunately, though, her father wove a cocoon around his family by inviting other Filipino families in their region to join a social and cultural network called the Philippine-American Association of the High Desert.
While that group nurtured Tawatao’s pride in her ethnic identity, she said, the racism she faced outside it fueled a spirit of rebellion in her that awakened when she was 19, following the death of her mother, Goyie Tawatao. After that monumental loss, Tawatao said, she no longer wanted to be “the good immigrant daughter” and follow her father into a career in medicine.
Instead, she chose to go to law school where other Asian Pacific Islander students inspired her political activism and led her to volunteer with legal aid organizations. “I fell in love with that work for social justice and for representing low-income people, mostly people of color,” she said.
At the Equal Justice Society, Tawatao collaborated with the Black Parallel School Board and won a legal settlement in 2019 that requires independent monitoring of the Sacramento City Unified School District to ensure equity in its disciplining and education of Black students with disabilities.
“They’re students and humans and young people like everybody else who has aspirations, dreams, challenges, and … really the system is set up in so many ways to just fail them,” Tawatao said.
Vince Sales, the chief executive officer of Everyday Impact Consulting, nominated Tawatao for this award, saying she’s on a mission to “dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline and to fight race discrimination and promote equity in K-12 and higher education.”
Read more at sacbee.com.