Adena Ishii, BS ’14, grew up in Southern California. She left high school in the middle of 10th grade. She organized rallies to Sacramento as a community college student, couch-surfed while enrolled at Cal, and never once set out to be mayor of anything. Today, she is the mayor of Berkeley, the first Asian American and first woman of color to hold that seat in the city’s history. She also happens to be 35 years old.
When she arrived in Berkeley for the first time, she noticed the air. “Coming from Southern California, the air just feels different up here,” she says. “Cleaner, fresher.” Then she started learning the city’s history, and that made her want to stay. Berkeley was a city of firsts, a city that didn’t just tolerate social movements but made space for them. For someone who grew up with a strong sense of social justice and equity, it felt like home. Seventeen years later, she’s still discovering new things about Berkeley.
Her path to Cal was not direct. She started at Berkeley City College, where she organized against California’s 2009 education budget cuts and helped start a program supporting community college students transferring to four-year universities. She noticed something at BCC that she credits to this day: the sheer range of people around her. Different ages, different races, different life experiences. The kind of diversity that doesn’t always travel up the educational pipeline. She also worked, like most of her classmates, because the flexible schedule made it possible, and because there wasn’t another choice.
When she transferred to Haas, she brought all these experiences with her. She took what she was learning in accounting, marketing, and organizational management and applied it directly to the Transfer Service Community program she was building on campus. “It was kind of like creating a nonprofit while being a student,” she says. Running it meant finding funding, doing outreach, building something from nothing, and doing it all in service of students who looked like her, who had come along the same path she had. A business degree, she understood early, would give her credibility in rooms that might otherwise look past her. Understanding budgets, she now says, is a significant part of running a city.
She became mayor in 2024. When people asked if the transition felt like drinking from a fire hose, she told them honestly that it didn’t. Her campaign had knocked on more than 20,000 doors across Berkeley. She already knew the city’s government, its neighborhoods, its people. “It really is the best job I’ve ever had,” she says, without hesitation.
But the milestone of being the first is not something she wears lightly. She says she is proud of it, and also a little embarrassed by it. “I’m so proud that I’m the first Asian American mayor, the first woman of color, and I’m also sort of embarrassed for my city that I’m the first in 2024.” She had felt that same mix of pride and discomfort years earlier, when she became the youngest person and first woman of color elected president of the League of Women Voters in the organization’s 107-year history. Those milestones said less about her than about how long it can take to create change.
What she took from it was not a sense of arrival but of responsibility. She talks about “building the bench,” about making sure the people who come after her don’t have to fight the same barriers she did. In her own office, that means hiring people who don’t typically work in politics, paying interns instead of making opportunities contingent on being able to afford to work for free. “Students shouldn’t have to pick between an unpaid internship and a job,” she says. “We should be paying people what they deserve.”
Her family’s history shapes her work in ways that are direct and visible. Some of Ishii’s Japanese American relatives were incarcerated during World War II, and she draws an explicit line between that history and what she sees happening to immigrant communities now. “The incarceration of Japanese Americans was a result of racism,” she says. “And we need to look at what’s happening today with the attacks on our immigrant communities and call that out as racism too.” She points out that the Asian American community is among those currently being targeted by immigration enforcement, a fact she says too few people acknowledge. As someone who is fourth generation, she feels the weight of that history and the obligation to make sure it is not repeated.
Berkeley became the nation’s first sanctuary city, and under Ishii, that designation has moved from symbolic to structural. She leads a monthly Sanctuary City Task Force, bringing together educators, healthcare workers, legal service providers, and immigrants themselves. Her office contributed $100,000 toward a $200,000 Immigrant Defense Fund. She has pushed back against surveillance proposals, including the deployment of Flock cameras, on the grounds that they pose risks to the city’s immigrant population. “We’re not resting on our laurels,” she says.
There is a countdown clock on her desk. It tracks the days remaining in her term, and she looks at it not with anxiety but with something closer to intention. “Every single day is really important and valuable,” she says. “How I’m spending my time, who I’m meeting with, where I’m going.” She has around 900 days left, and she describes that number as a lot of days, full of possibility. Her three priorities, housing and homelessness, public safety, and infrastructure, are what she returns to constantly, repeating them so often that the people around her know exactly where she stands.
On housing, Berkeley is outperforming most California cities, though she is careful not to say that with too much satisfaction. Hundreds of units have come online in the past year. She has been to the ribbon cuttings. But she is more interested in rethinking the whole system, in making it legible for the people trying to navigate it, in tracing the path from the street to permanent supportive housing and making that path shorter and clearer for more people. She knows what housing insecurity feels like. It was not until she was deep into the work of helping others access housing that she recognized what she had experienced as a student as homelessness, and that recognition widened her understanding of who is vulnerable and what they need.
When she was a Cal student she, volunteered at Emerson Elementary School, not far from campus. Some of the children she knew when they were in kindergarten are nearly ready for college now. She walks by a community center whose funding came from a ballot measure she canvassed for, door by door. “That kind of change is really exciting and inspiring,” she says, “and if you’re focused on politics on the national level, you might miss it.” She is not missing it.
For Cal students and recent graduates thinking about careers in public service, she offers something simple: no one told her it was even an option. She left high school without a diploma, learned how the government worked through poli-sci courses and Sacramento rallies and voter registration drives, and ended up in the highest seat in the city she loves. “I didn’t set out to be mayor,” she says. “It was really through public service, and serving my community in different ways, that I ended up in this seat.”
