Chiara Padilla L’24

Chiara was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, and is the first person in her family to graduate from high school and college. While completing her degree in Gender Studies, Chiara spent a year interning with a rape recovery center that provided free and low-cost mental health services to survivors of sexual violence. There, she led workshops with youth and Spanish-monolingual communities on sexual violence and healthy relationships. Both experiences informed and affirmed Chiara’s commitment to a client-centered approach to healing and justice.

Chiara joins the Penn Carey Law community with the aim of restructuring existing legal systems to further gender and racial equity. Chiara’s lived experiences as an immigrant have guided her commitment to empowering marginalized communities in accessing sexual and reproductive care. For the last couple of years, Chiara furthered her experience in the reproductive rights space as the Associate Director of Development for Planned Parenthood of Utah. At Planned Parenthood, Chiara realized how profoundly reproductive health care and sexual violence interact with other systemic inequities to disproportionately impact women and queer folks.

Prior to her time at Planned Parenthood, Chiara worked at a Bay Area organization that empowers young parents to graduate from high school and pursue secondary education.