_14297_34265589.png){kind=logo}
She came to America at the age of 2, the daughter of Hmong refugees, herself a refugee, born in a refugee camp in Thailand. She grew up in a home where reading the books that she loved was considered a waste of time spent better on necessities such as cooking and cleaning. She prevailed on her own to complete high school and graduate from college and go on to become a pharmacist.
Maybe it was the same kind of straight-shot path to success that any ambitious woman would enjoy if she worked hard enough to bring out the best of what’s inside her. Maybe she was just inherently smart and talented. Maybe her achievements in life were somehow sewn into her DNA.
And maybe she got some help along the way.
For Molly Chiah, you could make the case that all of the above is true. But if you ask her if there was any one turning point that directed her on her current path of success, she might tell you it was when she was 17 years old and her family had just moved out of Chico – and into the Victory Townhomes Mutual Housing Community in North Sacramento.
If there was any hour in any day, Molly might also tell you that her moment came when she accompanied her parents to the Victory Townhomes office to apply for a rental home. Her mother and father did not speak much English, and they needed her to help with the translation. In assisting them in their first contact with Mutual Housing, a staff member at Victory Townhomes – a community organizer named Cynthia Brooks – saw something in the way Molly handled herself in helping her parents. What the organizer saw was something that Molly was too young at the time to realize on her own, and that was that she had a load of talent that was just waiting to be let loose on the world.
“I was there to help my parents, and when they were turning the application in, the community organizer approached me,” Molly recalled about her interaction 15 years ago with the organizer at Victory Townhomes. “I’d never heard of community organizers. She asked me to come back and see her once we were accepted, and when we finally moved in, I met with her and she told me about this internship position that they had opened to create and facilitate after-school and summer programs for kids. The only requirement was that I be a resident. I was beyond thrilled to accept it, and I became an intern right off the bat.”
Then, Molly went on, “Whatever leadership skill I had inside me, they encouraged it. As a young person, I always had this ambition, but I didn’t know what it was or what to do with it. They unlocked it, but they also really fostered it. They just had this foundation to give me, and all of these resources to go with it.”
More than anything, the internship experience gave Molly confidence. It exposed her to other opportunities that put Molly in touch with some of the Sacramento area’s most prominent personalities – political leaders, community activists, and business people. Years later, when she was accepted into the Thomas J. Long School of Pharmacy and Health Sciences at the University of the Pacific, Molly reached back to Mutual Housing California. She got in touch with Mutual Housing’s former chief executive officer, Rachel Iskow, to let her know of the honor, and to thank her for the organization’s help. Iskow, in turn, asked Molly if she’d be interested in joining the Mutual Housing’s board of directors.
It didn’t work out for Molly to then join the board, but it has worked out now. She was appointed to the board in September in her capacity as a former resident. It is in that role that Molly brings a perspective to the policy direction of Mutual Housing that is guided by her own story.
“My personal goal for the board, as a former resident, is to keep the resident focus,” Molly said. “I try to make sure that what we’re doing currently and for the future is consistent with and stays true to what I know from Mutual Housing. These youth programs, and the Culture of College and things like that – these are things that I benefited from and that I don’t want us to drift away from.
“I know there are so many residents who were touched by Mutual Housing and who have gone on to do amazing things,” she said. “In affordable housing, you become sustainable by building. My fight is that we’re more than just building. Everyone else is just building. But we have something special.”
For Molly, that means that her voice on the board will honor the community development side of the Mutual Housing operation and the people who make them happen.
Cynthia Brooks was the organizer at the time at Victory Townhomes who first spotted Molly’s abilities and worked with her to draw them out. More than a decade later, Brooks seemed genuinely flabbergasted – and honored – to hear that Molly would recall her so vividly and credit her so much for her life-altering impact.
“What I recall with Molly, what I saw, was that she was the strength in her family that helped them acclimate,” said Brooks, who later left Mutual Housing and who is now the director of program development for Pacific Housing Inc., another affordable housing nonprofit. “I saw that she was very determined. And inquisitive. And she had a lot of initiative. She stood out.”
Brooks said it is “incredibly gratifying” to hear about Molly’s successes.
“You plant the seed,” Brooks said, “but you don’t always get to see how the plant grows.”
Right in the middle as the sixth of 11 children, five older than herself and five younger, Molly grabbed onto everything that the Mutual Housing community development program put into her reach. In offering her the internship, Mutual Housing gave Molly a heightened sense of responsibility. Cynthia Brooks and the other Victory Townhomes officials treated her like any other staff member. They sent her to leadership programs. They even gave her the keys to the office.
Beyond the symbolic sense of being able to unlock the doors to her future, she also had the practical responsibility as an intern to help develop the after-school and summer programs that Victory Townhomes provided for the younger kids. She organized an intramural basketball league that won her a community service award. She spotted leadership qualities in some of the young people and recruited them to help her do the same thing that she was doing. She gained exposure to the community organizing side of Mutual Housing and threw herself into advocacy work. She helped get out the vote.
She got to meet the mayor, Heather Fargo, and other leaders.
“Just being exposed to them, sitting right next to them, I started to realize – hey, maybe one day I could be like them,” Molly said. “Then they just gave me the encouragement. When you grow up in a background such as mine, when your parents worked odd jobs and no one went to college, having an office job or having a title seems like something that is unreachable. You think they have something special or unique that allowed them to get there. But being able to sit next to them and have conversations with them, you realize, I’m just like that. You’re not so different. You just have to do the work to get there.”
Molly doesn’t know exactly how or where or why, but as a young girl she picked up a quality that has helped propel her in life – a love of reading. Her favorite hobby continued into her teens – Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, other English writers.
It took a little doing to convince her folks that there was any future in reading.
“Growing up in my family, from my cultural background, girls weren’t encouraged to go to school,” Molly said. “I remember when I was younger, I used to really like reading, and I would read a lot – silently. For my mom and dad, reading was just not a thing. I would read to myself, and my parents would tell me to stop pretending to read, that I should do something more productive, like chores or learn how to cook, things like that. They meant well. I think they were just trying to be realistic about things that I should learn that would be useful for me.”
Reading carried Molly through high school in Chico where her family eventually settled before they moved into Victory Townhomes when Molly was 17. She kept it up through junior college, and then at Sacramento State, where she majored in English and graduated with honors in the Sigma Tau Delta English Honor Society.
While she had always been into reading, Molly’s love of science came later to her. She found out soon enough that she was pretty good at it. Good grades increased her interest, and the better she got at things like biology and chemistry, the more she found that she liked them.
“You can’t sit through hours and hours of studying chemical bonds if you don’t really enjoy it,” Molly said.
Molly actually double-majored in biology at Sac State but dropped it after she completed her work in English and was accepted into the pharmacy program at UOP in 2013.
Before her enrollment at UOP, Molly worked for more than a decade as a certified phlebotomy technician/senior laboratory assistant for Sutter Medical Center, Sacramento. She graduated from UOP in 2016 and later went to work for a pharmacy that provides services to skilled nursing facilities, assisted living communities, hospices and youth homes.
“Being a pharmacist working with patients is extremely rewarding,” Molly said of her work.
Outside of her job, Molly has worked as a volunteer for agencies such as the Salvation Army and the Society for the Blind, to satisfy her impulse to give back, to pay back, in exchange for the many who have given to her.
These days, her volunteer effort is going solely toward her work on the Mutual Housing board of directors.
“Being involved in Mutual Housing allowed me to see that there is this whole other world where you can help everyone, where you can help anyone,” she said. “When I was younger, I didn’t know there was volunteer work for things you care about, things you are passionate about. I wish I could do more. All the services I received when I was younger, somebody had to volunteer for it. And it made a huge difference in my life, so if I can volunteer back, I hope to make a difference and touch someone’s life in a small way, to give back, because I remember the effect it had on me.”