Supermom. Humanitarian. Leader. These are the three words PTHV Co-Founder and Senior Advisor, Yesenia Ramirez used to describe her late sister-friend and PTHV Co-Founder, Jocelyn Graves.  

In the PTHV community, Jocelyn is best known for laying the groundwork that led to our founding 26 years ago, and she is the namesake of an annual award PTHV bestows upon outstanding education champions. But Jocelyn’s story and influence started long before that. In fact, she grew up and attended school in the community she later helped to change dramatically. A graduate of Luther Burbank High School in the Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD), Jocelyn attended a local college, became a bookkeeper, and moved out of her childhood community.  

In the early 80s, while she was pregnant, Jocelyn’s life changed forever. She learned that she was HIV positive. As her illness progressed, she moved back to the neighborhood of her youth, where her family still lived and could help her take care of her sons.  

It had been about a decade since Jocelyn had lived in the area, but little had changed. Students were struggling in school. Local police were harassing the predominantly Mexican and Black youth, and violence was rampant.  

In response to what she saw, Jocelyn’s commitment to change was so strong that she was known for defending neighborhood youth against local police who were notorious for harassing kids for playing basketball in the street or sitting on the curb. According to Yesenia, Jocelyn would go as far as pulling these youngsters out of the backs of police cars, which nearly got her arrested on several occasions.  

Yet, the state of education in the area was particularly troubling to Jocelyn, especially because her sons were being affected. The school system had a disturbingly low graduation rate, and many children at the elementary school, including her fifth-grade son, were reading below grade level. Protests, riots, and students walking out of schools were the norm. Furthermore, the conditions of school buildings were less than satisfactory, with teachers being forced to teach outside when temperatures ran high due to the lack of AC. Students worked with plastic buckets on their desks during rainy seasons because of leaky ceilings. 

A lack of trust, communication, and connection between the district and the families it served was at the heart of the community’s problems. Something as simple as parents meeting with their child’s teacher was nearly impossible, let alone getting into the district’s central hub to talk to higher-ups. As was the attitude of other institutions in the area, such as the police department, this neighborhood was considered a “throwaway community”.  

Jocelyn was determined to change things. Her motivation to do so stemmed not only from her own experience growing up in the community, but also a belief that without quality education, low-income, black and brown youth in the area would continue falling through the cracks. This was coupled with a determination to keep her sons from being labeled as “less-than.”.  

However, before PTHV was even a thought, her efforts began in the greater community. With the help of Sacramento Area Congregations Together (ACT) and Yesenia, Jocelyn led the way to improvement. Her actions made it possible for the neighborhood to say goodbye to broken streetlights, stolen cars dumped in front of schools, trashed streets, and problematic police officers. Despite warnings from neighbors that she and Yesenia were putting themselves in harm’s way by doing the physical labor of cleaning the streets in dangerous areas, they kept at it. 

With these changes underway, Jocelyn also worked with Sacramento ACT and the school district to improve the educational landscape. She helped establish a new district office building that would be more inviting and easily accessible to families. More importantly, she, along with Yesenia, wanted to get to the bottom of the distrust, disconnection, and lack of communication between parents and the school district. And she wasn’t afraid to knock on doors to do it.  

Through a listening campaign with Sacramento ACT organizers, Jocelyn and Yesenia conducted 150 home visits within their community trying to get a sense of what families wanted out of SCUSD. Despite the lackluster response from the schools to listen to the results of the campaign, Jocelyn and her comrades pushed on, making PTHV what it is today.  

Even as her health condition worsened, and PTHV expanded beyond Sacramento, Jocelyn wanted to be involved as much as possible. Yesenia recalls the pair traveling for PTHV trainings, pulling over multiple times along the way because Jocelyn would be sick to her stomach due to medications she was taking. But she refused to turn around. “That was the kind of person she was,” says Yesenia. 

Instead of illness limiting her, it pushed her to educate others about AIDS. In addition to being involved with a local AIDS organization, she presented at health fairs with her and Yesenia’s children in tow, distributed informational health resources and clean needles to drug users, promoted regular HIV testing, and educated students within SCUSD about the disease. Her efforts in the arena led to a gala where she was recognized with an award for all her work.  

Jocelyn’s work in education, in the community, surrounding AIDS and beyond can never be forgotten, but she left a lasting impression on her dear friend Yesenia in a more personal way.  

“She was my angel,” says Yesenia. “There were days I just gave up and she would call my house three times and if I didn’t get on the phone by the third time, she would be knocking on my door and she would be getting me out of bed…And that’s how she helped me survive, and she was the one with the illness.”  

Moreover, Jocelyn validated Yesenia’s story of triumph, and pushed her to share it with others during their door-to-door campaigns for PTHV, knowing it had the power to move and inspire people the same way it does today.   

“She was always caring and protective of me,” says Yesenia. She remembers their last trip together fondly. During a week-long education conference in Philidelphia, some of the information was unfamiliar to the pair. Yesenia admits, “I’m sure she understood more than me—I am positive—because she had an education, and I didn’t. But if I didn’t understand, she pretended like she didn’t understand. She would always take care of me.” 

“There wouldn’t be Parent Teacher Home Visits without her,” says a tearful Yesenia. “She asked all the hard questions. She did all the pushing, the meetings with board members and the district.” 

Though Jocelyn passed away before she could see all that PTHV would become, she is still very much a part of the organization today. In fact, PTHV created an award in her name to recognize and appreciate key supporters and contributors. Each year, the award is bestowed upon a special friend of PTHV’s, such as Michele Brooks and Nick Faber.  

“This is what she wanted,” says Yesenia. “She wanted parents to be involved in their kids’ education. She would be so proud to see so many kids’ lives touched by what we started back then.” 

PTHV owes so much of what it has become to Jocelyn.  

“This is her legacy,” says Yesenia.