California State Senator Marie Alvarado-Gil was elected in 2022 and represents the counties of Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, El Dorado, Inyo, Madera, Mariposa, Merced, Mono, Nevada, Placer, Stanislaus and Tuolumne as an independent leader in the legislature.
Senator Alvarado-Gil is the Chair of the Senate Human Services Committee and serves on several committees including; Agriculture, Business & Professionals, Government Organization, Insurance, Military & Veterans, and is the Senate liaison to the California Department of Education’s Advisory Commission on Special Education. In addition, she is the vice-chair of the Rural Caucus and active in the Problem Solvers Caucus; both common-sense coalitions for bipartisan and bicameral policymaking.
Marie is a native Californian whose fondest memories of her childhood were spent in the classroom and summers visiting with her extended family in Mexico. Growing up on farmland in the Bay Area, she played in rows of apricot and cherry tree orchards behind her childhood home before learning to shuck corn and grind masa at her grandmother’s tortilla factory in Jalisco as a teenager. Marie was the first female to go to college in her family. She attended UC Davis to study Animal Science before pivoting from her education to raise three amazing children as a single parent in rural northern California. While building a promising career in both the public and nonprofit sectors, Marie returned to college mid-career earning both a Bachelor and Master Degree in Public Administration with emphasis in Health Services Administration from the University of San Francisco.
Marie has a professional background in charter school growth and administration, community organizing and advocacy, and coalition building. She has dedicated her life to public service leadership while balancing the demands of a growing family and an executive career. Policy issues that she has led in the Senate include resource equity for rural communities, wildfire relief for homeowners insurance and protections of farms and water rights across the central valley. The Senator’s tough stance on crime and fiscally conservative voice of the supermajority has earned her the title of The Western Blue Dog.
Marie lives in Amador County among the forested mountains of the Sierra Foothills. She and her husband Cesar are owners and principals at STUDIS Partners, an education consulting firm that represents charter schools and other public school institutions throughout the United States and Central America.