Helena Pasquarella is a lifelong organizer and advocate for peace and social equity.

Helena's advocacy for people and justice began when she was a child.

My concern for social justice issues dates back to my travels as a young child to Brazil, my mother's homeland, where I witnessed the extreme poverty of the shantytowns daily and the austere conditions of the farm workers in the interior. I felt this deep divide was unacceptable, considering the contrast of wealth I saw in my homeland in Los Angeles, where I grew up. I always knew that I had to contribute to alleviating the situation of people experiencing poverty wherever I lived. In high school, I wrote my final English term paper about the conditions of Mexican factory workers. I pursued college to work at the United Nations to help impoverished children.

With this in mind, I embarked in the Diplomacy and World Affairs Studies program at Occidental College, where I was one of the 15 chosen to participate in the OXY at the UN program. As a junior, I received the coveted Richter Fellowship, which allowed me to travel back to Brazil, where I researched the urban poor and how they were organizing to ameliorate their living conditions related to the role of rapid urbanization in the metropolis of Sao Paulo. Afterward, I created a powerful slide show that I presented to hundreds of high school and college students in the Los Angeles area.

Upon graduating from OXY with my BA in Liberal Arts, I received the prestigious Watson Foundation Fellowship of 1989, which allowed me to engage in researching the conditions of refugees in war-torn areas around the world; the year-long project took me to Honduras, Mexico, Geneva, Kenya, and Malawi, where I researched the role of NGO’s providing aid to refugees.

This physical and spiritual journey changed the path of my life from pursuing a career in NGOs to becoming a photojournalist focusing on social justice issues. During that year, I brought my 35mm film camera and documented my findings on 35 rolls of film. This led me to Pierce College, where I received several awards and my certificate in Journalism after completing the two-year program.

While working as a photojournalist for the Ventura County LA Times for eight years, I completed my MA coursework in Latin American Studies at UCSB and created a documentary film about farmer workers and their struggles with pesticide usage in industrialized agriculture sectors in the Oxnard and Santa Maria areas.

While pursuing my Master's in Education at Johns Hopkins University Maryland and freelancing at The Washington Post, I received my teaching credential after completing my internship at Peabody Elementary School in Santa Barbara. Later, I moved to Orange County and became an English as a Second Language and Journalism teacher at Santa Ana High School, where I taught for three years until I left the profession to start my family.

During the following ten years, I was the Director of 3DCheeze, an award-winning, family-owned event photography company that my ex-husband and I birthed at the same time our son Theodore was born. When my son was nine, I moved back to the family home in Ojai, California, to raise my son, teach at Ojai Valley School, and care for my aging mother, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2016.

Since 2020, I have been the Director at The US Department of Peace based in Ojai, where I work to promote peace at home and abroad through community events, organizing weekly peace vigils, speaking at city council meetings, and hosting a monthly Potluck for Peace to raise funds and awareness about local and international peace issues.