azcentral.com - Arizona Originals: Persistent | Kyrsten Sinema

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By Jane Larson

Kyrsten Sinema, 36, jumped into the fray early -- she started accumulating college credits in high school and earned a bachelor's degree in social work from Brigham Young University when she was 18. She has earned a master's degree in social work, a law degree and a Ph.D in justice studies from Arizona State University in the years since. She has held positions as a social worker, an attorney and as an adjunct ASU instructor in social work.

"I always like doing things fast," she said in a 2007 interview with The Arizona Republic.

Sinema, who was born in Tucson, has overcome notable odds to accomplish her goals. For a couple of years, she says, her family lived in an abandoned gas station with no electricity or running water. She became a social worker to help struggling families. Her involvement in politics grew as she realized that their problems -- poverty, homelessness, job loss, abuse -- were common to many people, and that solving these problems meant thinking bigger than one family at a time.

Since her early 20s, she has been active in political causes, winning election to the Arizona House of Representatives in 2004 and to the Arizona Senate in 2010. In 2012, she won a hard-fought race against former Paradise Valley Mayor Vernon Parker for the congressional seat. She is the first openly bisexual person elected to Congress.

Her work on two statewide ballot initiatives, including one against a ban on gay marriage, shows her ability to mobilize voters. She helped organize a massive immigrant-rights march, supports the Dream Act and same-sex-marriage legislation, and recently took her seat on the influential House Financial Services Committee, which affects housing, insurance and other issues important to Arizona.

Businesses expanding in the district and the jobs they generate are on Democrat Sinema's mind as a new member of the House committee, and its housing, insurance and oversight subcommittees. She's looking at ways the committee's work can help businesses and wage earners in Arizona.

"Every time I meet with a business, particularly some of these guys who are doing such innovative work in science, technology and biotech, the passion is evident," she says. "And when we're talking about technological advancement, you've got to have both patience and persistence because you hit so many bumps before you hit the eureka."

Sinema represents a district that starts in north-central Phoenix, home to much of the state's financial-services industry, and runs east and south to include defense contractors such as Honeywell Inc. in Phoenix and General Dynamics Corp. in Scottsdale, tech startups in Tempe and high-tech manufacturing giant Intel Corp. in Chandler. The district also has ideas incubating on Arizona State University's campus and along the Price Road corridor through Tempe and Chandler.

One subcommittee is examining how to strengthen the Federal Housing Administration, which insures home mortgages, and Sinema hopes the work will help stabilize Arizona's housing market and get more middle-class families back into homes. The panel also is considering reforms to the government-controlled mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

"Now that many folks in our community are getting their lives back on track … we're going to help them get back into home ownership," Sinema says. "We know that home ownership is good for the whole local economy. When people have stable jobs, they're investing and they're spending their money with local businesses."

As implementation of 2010's Dodd-Frank financial reform act continues, Sinema also wants to make sure that the regulations don't overburden Arizona's community banks. And she hears small businesses' pleas for Congress to stop governing by crisis and start creating a stable, predictable business climate.

Beyond those needs, she's also concerned about the "Valley of Death," where good inventions are said to die because their creators either don't have the skills or the financing to convert their knowledge into marketable products. Sinema hopes Congress has room to support crowd-sourcing, a type of financing in which multiple investors put minimal sums into startups, although she adds that any action needs to protect both those who invest and those who receive funds.

"We're always looking for opportunities to figure out how to make it easier for people to invest," she says, "and to choose Arizona as a creative outpost."

Standing up for alternative ideas is what Sinema does. In 2007, she introduced a bill that would have equated Minutemen, a citizens group monitoring illegal immigration at the Mexico border, with domestic terrorists.

Sinema stood up for her proposal as the kidnapping and rape threats piled up and as the blogosphere buzzed with personal attacks. In the Legislature, she proposed dozens of other ideas, including repealing the death penalty and requiring Arizona to significantly slash its greenhouse-gas emissions.

"I'm not afraid to take a stand on the issues that are important," Sinema said in the 2007 interview.

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