When Marybel Batjer left her C-suite position with Caesars Entertainment in Las Vegas to run California’s newly-created Department of Government Operations in 2013, Gov. Jerry Brown tasked her with a big mandate: Make the Golden State’s government more efficient. Five years later and recently named one of Governing magazine’s 2017 Public Officials of the Year, Batjer sat down with us to discuss what she’s done to make that a reality.

In Sacramento’s Oak Park neighborhood, community dance lives, thanks to identical twin sisters Heather and Holly Singleteary, co-founders of the BlyueRose Dance Project at the Instituto Mazatlan de Bellas Artes.

In his 2005 book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,” Malcolm Gladwell polled Fortune 500 companies and found that 30 percent of CEOs were 6 feet 2 inches or taller. In comparison, only 3.9 percent of the U.S. population are of that height.

Why? Unconscious bias.

As a teenager growing up in Iraq in the 1990s, Khaleel Yasir wanted to become a U.S. citizen. But his path to citizenship — like that of so many others — turned into a decades-long journey.

Kelly Gillett, vice president of the Women in Leadership club at UC Davis, and board member of WEAVE’s retail advisory board, offers her insight into attracting more women into leadership roles in both the business and nonprofit world.

 At most University of California campuses, Latinos comprise less than 10 percent of instructors—in a state where Latinos make up nearly a quarter of UC undergrads and more than half of graduates from public high schools.

We’re highlighting six of the Capital Region’s most influential female leaders who are blazing trails in their respective industries. 

More than half of U.S. business women, 80 percent of all female tech leaders, the majority of female legislators and nearly every female astronaut got their start in Girl Scouts.

Preservation Sacramento is a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the city’s historic places, and The Hive — Sacramento’s largest coworking community — recently expanded into a 15,000-square-foot space at the historic Cannery, which has been redeveloped into a business park.

After years of waiting, Khaleel Yasir and his wife, Zuhal Al Ameen, became naturalized U.S. citizens on Feb. 22 at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium. During the monthly naturalization ceremony, 1,060 residents from 81 countries took the oath of citizenship. Yasir resettled his family to Sacramento in 2012 after nine years of service as an interpreter for the U.S. military in Iraq.