This is exactly what we were trained for

In memory of Randy Rosso — advocate, data architect, and fellow

Last year, I sat in a congressional office beside a man named Randy Rosso. We had been paired during the RESULTS Fellows Conference in Washington, D.C. — two strangers who quickly understood we had come to the same work from opposite ends.

Randy came with 27 years of data.

Spreadsheets. Policy research. Program analysis. He had worked at the Urban Institute, Mathematica, and the Food Research and Action Center. He had spent nearly three decades mapping the geography of American hunger. He knew where the ladders were supposed to be.

He also knew they were broken.

I came with something different.

I knew what it felt like to stand at the bottom of one of those ladders.

In January 2014, I found out I was pregnant. Not long after, I lost my job. SNAP and Medicaid did not feel like policy to me then. They felt like oxygen. Without them, my daughter Tiffany and I might not have made it.

Years later, when I was laid off again, those same programs became my lifeline a second time. And when I fostered and adopted my youngest daughter, Madelynia, at just two or three days old, WIC was there until she aged out of it. She is on Medicaid now.

The programs we fight for are not abstractions in my house.

They are my daughters.

Randy had seen people like me in the data for decades. But sitting beside me, I think he saw us differently. And sitting beside him, I saw the data differently too — not as numbers on a page, but as proof that our stories were never isolated. They were part of a larger pattern of policy choices, broken systems, and lives placed at risk.

Randy had also seen another kind of broken system up close.

He had been diagnosed with brain cancer. What struck him — what he carried into every room and every conversation — was the parallel between his medical experience and the poverty crisis he had spent his career trying to solve.

His medical team, he said, had never outlined a path for him to become a long-term survivor. They treated the disease, but they never built him a road forward. He saw the same failure in American poverty policy.

Fifty years of programs. Fifty years of treating symptoms. And still no true pathway — no designed, intentional, accountable road — that made it possible for people to escape poverty and hunger, much less end them for everyone.

Randy called them broken ladders.

And while fighting for his own life, he was still trying to build a better framework for others.

Then he walked into a congressional office with us and used every bit of that fire.

I remember the legislative staffer who challenged our group to “write our own bill.” It felt dismissive. It felt like the kind of thing someone says when they have already decided not to listen.

But Randy pushed back.

He had seen the data. He understood what was actually at stake for children, for older adults, for disabled people, and for families like mine. He refused the false comfort that said everyone would be protected. He had worked too long, knew too much, and cared too deeply to let that stand unchallenged.

That was last year.

That year, H.R. 1 passed.

The children are not protected. The elderly are not protected. The programs Randy spent 27 years fighting for — SNAP, Medicaid, WIC, and the basic social safety net — are being gutted in real time.

The ladders are not just broken.

They are being dismantled, rung by rung, in a bill passed by people who once told us to write our own.

And Randy is gone.

I will not pretend this moment is not exhausting.

It is.

We are tired. Some of us are burned out. Some of us are grieving. Some of us are wondering how many times we can walk into rooms, tell the truth, share our stories, bring the data, and still watch people in power choose harm anyway.

The work is heavy. The losses are real. And some days it is hard to remember why we keep showing up.

But I keep coming back to Randy.

He showed up while fighting brain cancer.

He showed up with data, with clarity, with compassion, and with an absolute refusal to let policymakers rest easy in their assumptions. He advocated to his last breath — not because it was convenient, not because victory was certain, but because the people on the other end of these cuts do not get to stop living with the consequences.

So we do not get to stop either.

This is not the moment to walk away.

This is the moment we were trained for.

Not the easy moments. Not only the wins. This moment — the hard, ugly, consequence-filled moment when giving up feels reasonable and staying feels impossible.

This is why RESULTS built us.

This is why we sat in those offices.

This is why we learned to read the data, write the op-eds, make the calls, tell our stories, and keep coming back.

Randy knew what was coming.

He said so.

And he showed up anyway.

This is how I say thank you to Randy Rosso.