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Liana Flores came to Athens in '96 to study at Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ University and earned degrees in Elementary Education and a second in Spanish. She graduated from OU with three children in tow and spent the next 8 years as a single mother in SE Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ. She is grateful for the societal structures that allowed her the time to grow and nurture her young family.

She volunteered at the local school, teaching Spanish in each of her children's classrooms, and helped regularly at various community meals. Eventually, she met her loving husband, who taught her so much about neuro-divergence and the struggle of navigating the mental healthcare system. They added two more to their growing family because life was not complicated enough with emerging teens and learning the ins and outs of the Autism Spectrum in homelife!

Today, Liana is a listener with the Friendship Bench, helping community members to solve problems they may be facing. Some of the issues that have been brought to her on "the bench" are homelessness, need for transportation resources, rising costs of food and medical medications, mental illness and family members struggling with drug addiction.

Rose Frech is a licensed social worker with broad expertise in navigating the complexities of the health and social services in Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ. She has served in key positions in fundraising, management, policy analysis, and advocacy in multiple areas of the sector, including community mental health, food and public benefits access, Community Action, Medicaid, and early intervention. A longtime social work educator, Rose has had the privilege of teaching new social workers for over 10 years. Born and raised in Athens, she is a passionate advocate for the Appalachian Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ region. Rose currently serves as the Grants and Business Development Administrator at Integrated Services for Behavioral Healthcare, a behavioral health and housing organization serving 21 counties across Southeast Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ.  

Peggy P. Lee is a senior staff attorney with the Legal Aid of Southeast and Central Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ (formerly Southeastern Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ Legal Services).  She joined as a staff attorney in 1996, where she worked on a wide variety of civil legal issues affecting low-income clients.  Peggy is presently focused on fair housing enforcement work and serves as project manager with the Fair Housing Center of Southeast and Central Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ, a project of LASCO. Peggy helps tenants in subsidized and nonsubsidized housing facing eviction. During the foreclosure crisis, she worked to help homeowners save their homes.  Ms. Lee holds a J.D. (1996) from Cornell Law School.  She is also a 2015 alumnus of the Shriver Center on Poverty Law's Racial Justice Institute program and serves as Vice-President of the Mount Zion Black Cultural Center's board.

Theo (TAY-oh) Peck-Suzuki is a journalist covering housing and poverty in southeast Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ for WOUB Public Media and Report for America. Among the pieces he has reported are a recent series on the housing shortage in Southeast Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ, , as well as numerous other articles about poverty and related social issues. Before settling on his current career, Theo served two years in AmeriCorps with the sustainable development organization Rural Action. He was born in New York but moved to Athens with his parents at age 2. He’s left more than once for school but has always found his way back.