Carla

Community Resources Guide
Tacoma, WA

Carla brings tenacity, curiosity, and hard-won empathy to her work as a Community Resources Guide at firsthand’s Tacoma office. Raised in a poverty-stricken household where mental illness was whispered about but never treated, she learned early to fend for herself—yet also sensed that survival alone wasn’t enough. Those formative experiences now fuel her mission to secure stability and hope for people navigating housing insecurity, re-entry after incarceration, and serious mental health challenges.

Before joining firsthand, Carla spent eight years as a certified nursing assistant, then served as a case manager at Comprehensive Life Resources, helping neighbors exiting prison or experiencing homelessness to find safe housing. She measures her success in stories: like the man who went to prison at fifteen and, with her guidance, walked into his first apartment decades later—cell phone in hand, job search underway, and peer support certification on the horizon.

Carla’s drive is personal as well as professional. She and the women in her family live with hereditary tremors—likely rooted in generations of untreated trauma. Carla became the first in her family to earn a bachelor’s degree and is now pursuing a master’s in psychology, determined to uncover the science behind those tremors and break the cycle for her own children.

Since joining firsthand, Carla has felt her once-fierce self-reliance melt into something stronger: shared purpose. “I finally see what it means to have a whole team at your back,” she says. In that spirit of collective care, she recently persuaded a reluctant participant to enter detox and is now cheering her through each milestone of recovery, knowing progress is possible when no one has to walk alone.