Courtney was born in Denver, Colorado, and raised by a single mother of two who also took care of Courtney’s grandmother. Courtney’s father was absent in her life, and her mother often worked more than one job to make ends meet. Her mother has dedicated her life to serving the public working in law enforcement and continues to work as a police dispatcher today. Her mother’s passion for making a change in her community was influenced when her father was murdered when she was nineteen years old. In addition to working in local law enforcement, her mother also did volunteer work with FEMA and Homeland Security. Courtney grew up volunteering alongside her mother fueling her interest in making a difference wherever she can.

Courtney was born and lived in Westminster, Colorado until she was eight years old. At the time, crime rates were rising in the area and her family’s home was burglarized multiple times. Her mother wanted to keep her family safe and have access to better schools, so they moved to Highlands Ranch, Colorado. This is something that Courtney grew to understand as unfair that everyone wasn’t guaranteed the same opportunities based on the zip code they resided in, both in safety and education.

Courtney was raised in a household that promoted independent thinking and research. She was given guidance on how to do research and find information to form her opinions without outside bias. Her passion for politics started to flourish during the 2008 election. Interested in the election process, Courtney went with her mom to the polls and waited in line for hours to cast her vote. It was a perfect opportunity to ask her mother questions about elections. It is a memory that she holds near to her because it empowered her interest in politics.

When Courtney was eleven years old her mother was involved in a near-fatal traffic accident that led to her being left in a coma, having a traumatic brain injury, and multiple major surgeries to repair the severe injuries she endured. Courtney was told on multiple occasions that her mother may not make it through the night. She remained positive and supportive and encouraged her mom while she rehabilitated from her injuries. Even though her family had healthcare coverage, her mother was left with hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills. This is when Courtney began to learn that our healthcare system is broken and how unfair it is that people can pay for insurance yet still have the possibility to be financially burdened by something out of their control. Although this was a hard obstacle in her life, she learned to remain positive and to have strength while dealing with the lifelong symptoms that go along with lupus which she was diagnosed with in 2018. Before the diagnosis, she had to go to the emergency room many times but was always told nothing was wrong even though she had symptoms of swelling of her throat and would feel sick frequently while no one else around her was. She finally asked her doctor to do some tests to determine if it could be lupus and had to advocate for herself longer than anyone should for them to finally run the tests and diagnose. This shouldn’t have happened, and she advocates for the discrimination and the record of doctors not listening to their patients, especially female patients of color where it happens more frequently, to end. She remains thankful that she has the healthcare coverage to receive the treatment that she needs, but it’s a concern and issue she strongly feels should not be a privilege. No one should have to live without access to medical, dental, or vision services because they can’t afford insurance. The continuously rising medical costs deter so many people from seeking necessary medical care and she supports Medicare For All as a human right.

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Courtney’s husband served eleven years in the United States Air Force in both cybersecurity and aviation. They moved to several different states and in 2016 they moved to their last duty station at Hurlburt Field located on the northwest side of the Florida panhandle. She pursued one of her interests to earn an esthetician license and worked in that field until the pandemic began. However, during her time there, she started to understand the overwhelming racism that exists for people in southern states firsthand. She experienced racism throughout her life due to her Mexican and Middle Eastern ethnicities, but never quite that intensely, and the frequency started rising after the 2016 election. When her husband’s enlistment was coming to an end, they decided to start a new chapter in life and moved to Los Angeles in August 2020.

Like many, she watched the 2020 election closely after four years of politics that threatened minority’s rights, she was concerned that our country would continue to set back the progress we had made since our founding. When the election was over, and Joe Biden was declared the president-elect it felt like a sigh of relief. She had no idea that January 6th, 2021, was going to change the course of her life. She watched as Trump gave his speech at the ellipse where he encouraged his voters from around the country to travel to Washington D.C. to protest the election certification and continued to falsely claim that a free and fair election was rigged. While she was watching Congress certify and debate about each state's results, live footage of Trump voters breaching The U.S. Capitol building started to air on television. This was devastating and weighed heavy on her heart to watch both our historic Capitol building being destroyed and our democratic process being disturbed so violently.

The January 6th attack made it very clear to Courtney that she wanted to play a bigger part in our democracy. Days later she enrolled in classes to finish her degree because she wanted to learn as much as she could to be an effective leader. She wants to represent and improve the quality of life for everyone.