Olivia Calderon is the California Legislative Director of the New America Foundation's Asset Building Program, which aims to significantly broaden savings and asset ownership in California. Based in Sacramento, her primary responsibilities include educating legislators, government officials, and interest groups about asset policies, developing related policy proposals (including drafting measures, amendments, and reports), providing expert testimony on pending legislation, identifying partnerships to build a broad coalition in support of asset building policies, and managing the Asset Policy Forum, which the program launched in August 2007.
Previously, Ms. Calderon served in the California Legislature as a consultant to the Assembly Transportation Committee, as a legislative assistant to Sen. Jenny Oropeza (D-Long Beach), and as a Jesse Unruh Assembly Fellow. Among her more notable accomplishments as a legislative staff member, Ms. Calderon drafted six major pieces of legislation, four of which were signed into law. She has testified before the California Senate committees on education, health, and labor, as well as the Assembly committees on appropriations, banking and finance, revenue and taxation, and higher education. Ms. Calderon is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was a NSEP Scholar, McNair Scholar, Wasserman Scholar, and UCLA Law fellow.