By Amy Mahler, Director of Government Engagement
At the Kennedy School, students transform personal experience into public leadership. Caren Yap MPP 2025 did just that by authoring legislation to protect her Nevada community while still a student in Cambridge—drawing on both her professional expertise and the policy tools gained through the Taubman Center. For her groundbreaking advocacy on behalf of Nevada’s workers, she received the top honor at graduation, the Robert F. Kennedy Award of Excellence in Public Service.
What was the need you saw? What did you address?
My home state of Nevada ranks 49th in the US in nurses per capita due to poor staffing standards that have overtaxed frontline nurses, leading to high rates of burnout and mass resignations. In my home city of Las Vegas, Nevada, a significant portion of our nursing and healthcare workforce is Filipino, where in 2021, National Nurses United found that of reported COVID-19 related deaths of registered nurses, 26.4 percent were Filipino. As a Filipino and former nursing assistant, my loved ones continued to express how unsafe staffing has put their patients, jobs, and well-being in danger. It was during these moments with my community where I was called to act.
How did you take action? And what was the outcome?
During graduate school, I worked over the course of almost two years to research and strategically gather nurses, educators, students, legislators, and labor unions to find a solution that the state needed, and the community wanted, which ultimately came in the form of state legislation. Our bill, Senate Bill 182 passed through the Assembly and Senate in the 2025 Nevada Legislature in our capitol, Carson City, in partnership with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU Local 1107) and National Nurses United.
This historic legislation would implement safe staffing and working conditions to improve the retention and satisfaction of Nevada nurses and nursing assistants, as well as increase patient health outcomes and mortality, lower cost of care, and prioritize patient safety. Our bill had one of the most testimonies in support of any piece of legislation this session, with over 1,300 opinions, 99 percent in support! Unfortunately, the bill was vetoed by the Governor in June, but our team has hopes of reintroducing this legislation in future sessions.
How has your lived experience, HKS education, and state and local experience informed you to make change in your community?
Whether it be through a client-based course or experiential program at HKS, I am beyond grateful to have been given opportunities to immerse myself in advocacy and state and local government. Some of these experiences included visiting the capitol in Maine for the Economic Development Seminar, working on diversity metrics for the City of Ogden, Utah through the Transition Term Program, and sharing the beauty of my communities in Arizona and Nevada through Urban & Rural Leadership Trek, all of which are Taubman Center programs. Making change in my community has been refined through this wider insight into the circumstances that create economic inequity, in addition to ethnic diversity, urban vs rural, and political makeup.
During my time on the Hawaii Governor’s Housing and Federal Funds Team, I distinctly remember watching nurses at Kapiʻolani Medical Center protest for safe staffing standards. Over the next few months, the center would lock out its nurses after their one-day strike. For me, this created a through-line for this systemic, nationwide issue that healthcare workers are experiencing, particularly for ethnic minorities.
And ultimately, it is my lived experience as a cashier, barista, nursing assistant, government staffer, first-generation immigrant that informs my understanding of local community-based policy work.
What are your reflections on this bill and your HKS experience?
I am completely changed for the better because of the people that made this bill possible, from the nurses in Nevada to the unions in Las Vegas to the policy experts at the Taubman Center. It has shown me that true collaboration is rooted in community listening and collective action. I’m proud to have been able to transfer this skillset to my own home. It has solidified my commitment to bettering the lives of working-class immigrants and reinvigorated my belief that true change happens on the state and local level.
About Caren Yap
Caren Yap (MPP 2025) is a community organizer and policy advocate dedicated to improving the material reality of working-class immigrants through state and local government. Most recently, Caren concluded her time as a Dukakis Governors’ Fellow for Hawaii and previously served as the Executive Secretary for the Nevada Legislature. She served as the 2024-2025 Senior Research Assistant for the Taubman Center’s Transition Term program and is also an alumna having served the newly elected mayor of Ogden, Utah in 2024, organized the annual Urban & Rural Leadership Trek to Arizona and Nevada, and an alumna of the yearlong Economic Development Seminar (2023-2024). In addition to the HKS Robert F. Kennedy Award of Excellence in Public Service, Caren was also awarded the Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Award for Excellence in Service and the William Julius Wilson Research Award.
