A cheerleader for vulnerable populations, Miranda Chavez advocacy never stops

By Gary Warth

June 24, 2026

When presenting Miranda Chavez with an award for Community Advocate of the year at the RTFH conference in 2023, Community Resource Center Chief Program Officer Rebecca Nussbaum called her colleague a beacon of hope for people in need and a remarkable advocate for people experiencing hunger and homelessness.

Chavez was gracious and humble in accepting the award, and also used the opportunity to ask funders in the room to provide a living wage for case managers when creating their budgets.

“What kind of advocate would I be if I didn’t get up here and advocate?” she said.

Her advocacy work apparently never pauses, and at the time she had worked 11 years at the Community Resource Center in Encinitas, overseeing the program’s growth and helping countless people with a variety of services.

Chavez took on a new role in December 2023 as program coordinator in San Diego County’s Office of Homeless Solutions, where she sees her advocacy continuing in a broader sense.

“I love people,” Chavez said as she reflected on her career. “I don’t know a stranger most of the time, and I think I’ve come to this field because I wanted to make the biggest impact.”

Besides her work with the Community Resource Center and the County, Chavez was part of the group that developed RTFH’s systemwide operating standards for rapid rehousing. She also coordinated the North Coastal branch of the Interfaith Shelter Network and for five

Years was co-chair for the Alliance for Regional Solutions’ Bridge to Housing Committee.

The 76th Assembly District recognized her as a Woman of Impact in the field of Health and Human Services in 2021, and she received a “40 Under 40” award from the Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce in 2023.

“She is genuine, authentic and speaks with truth and care, whether it is to a politician while advocating for homeless services at Capitol Hill, as she did this summer, or she’s speaking with an individual who has come for services on their worst day,” Nussbaum said at the RTFH awards ceremony.

That authenticity is rooted in Chavez’s own life, beginning with a childhood in a low-income area San Marcos and growing up with a single mother.

“I have lived experience in a lot of the arenas that I’ve worked in, and working with vulnerable populations was always important to me,” she said. “I was raised by really strong women who had a really strong sense of justice and what’s right.

“And being a child of a single mom, my community embraced me,” she continued. “So what more can you do but also embrace your community back when you have the opportunity to do that?”

Chavez graduated from San Marcos High School in 2002 and attended CSU San Marcos, where she earned bachelor’s degrees in sociology and in women’s studies and a master’s in sociological practice with a minor in criminal justice.

Married at 17 and a mother at 20, she juggled being a parent with concentrating on her studies.

“I would take him with me in class and he would sit under my desk and listen to Scooby-Doo while I did statistics,” she said about her son.

Chavez worked with the county Probation Department as a student, and her master’s thesis was on intervention and prevention programs with justice-involved youth.

She thought of going into a field related to her studies after college, but that plan morphed into a career working to help another vulnerable population: people experiencing homelessness.

As she moved into her new career, Chavez found inspiration in her young son.

“It was important to me that I did something that showed him that people are good and that there’s helpers,” she said. “We kind of look at the world like, who are the most successful people? Are they the CEOs or the people that have tons of money in jets and all of that, or is it the people that help?

“I always thought that it was the people that helped,” she continued. “So it was important to me to teach my son that there is value in being a good person and value in being a helper.”

That lesson seems to have worked. Twenty years later, her son is now working as a case manager at Interfaith Community Services.

Chavez worked at a few jobs related to her mission of helping people after college before joining the Community Resource Center as a bilingual case manager in 2012. She later became a program manager and then director of social services, where she oversaw homeless-focused social service programs and the Food and Nutrition Center.

Nussbaum said Chavez’s work at the Community Resource Center was transformative.

“During the time that I have worked with her, she has grown her team from four to 15, expanding programs and services in North County and really multiplying our impact,” Nussbaum said. “Over the years, she has participated in ensuring that thousands of individuals are housed and stay housed and are served with dignity and respect.”

At the County, her first assignment was working on two projects backed by the state’s Encampment Resolution Fund that provides grants to clear encampments and provide housing and services to people who had lived on or near Caltrans property.

“It really encouraged jurisdictions to work together, and that’s everyone from the County of San Diego to the different cities and Caltrans,” she said about the projects, which also include Santee and National City. “That’s what it takes. It’s a regional issue that takes a regional approach and regional solution. And it’s been a really, really great project and cool to see all the cities working together.”

Her latest assignment is helping house people through CalAIM (California Advancing and Innovating Medi-Cal), a new state initiative that sees housing as healthcare and is part of a long-term transformation of the Medi-Cal system.

Chavez still sees herself as an advocate as she goes to bat for her staff and for communities served by County programs.

“Everybody needs a fan club,” she said about her philosophy of advocacy. “Everybody needs a cheerleader. Those are the things that are impactful. And so when you get to be that for someone, that’s huge.No one wants to walk through the worst time in their life by themselves.”