Renée Meschi
Renée Meschi graduated from the University of Puget Sound in 2015 with a Bachelor’s in Science, Technology, and Society. She was the first class to graduate with an emphasis in Bioethics, which provided a springboard for her interest in the ethical intersection between people and the environment. She began working at the Pierce Conservation District, where she created the Cultural Ambassadors Program, in which the District follows a Community Centered Design process to co-create programming in 5 different languages.
Renée deepened her focus on Human Centered Design in her studies at the University of Washington, where she went on to graduate with a Master’s of Communication in Communities & Networks in 2021. Now, Renée is a Project Manager at the Tacoma Pierce County Health Department’s Centers for Excellence as a Project Manager for the Equity Action Collaborative. There, she connects multiple agencies across Pierce County to streamline their internal systems, proactively institutionalize equity, and pave the way for deeper engagement models such as Participatory Budgeting and Participatory Policymaking. A strong focus in her work continues to be language justice, and Renée is working with agencies to align their language access plans, policies, and procedures in a way that centers multilingual communities.