When faith and determination are pressed together, you get Anastasia Lester. She is the Senior Health Equity Analyst for Kern Health Systems but her passion for equity goes beyond her work title.
Lester had to be removed from her biological mother and her abusive boyfriend when she was two-years-old.
“We were homeless at the time, and she had a boyfriend who wasn’t very kind to me or her. Eventually, he got in trouble, and I was sent to foster families in foster care. I was adopted when I was three and a half. I just celebrated my adoption day on Saint Patrick’s Day.
Despite her young age, she explains she remembers the traumas she faced as some of them still impact her today.
“I always respond with the bad stuff is easy to remember. There were some challenging times there. I’m a pretty faithful person, although I cuss like a sailor, so most people don’t think that. But, I’ve always believed that God gave me the challenges or put me through, the not great stuff, we’ll say, because he felt like I could handle it,” said Lester.
Now, she is also an advocate for the Point in Time (PIT) Count in Kern County every year. Although it is not an official capacity for her, she explains that it’s important because she was once homeless. She mentioned taking her daughter to see the lot where she lived inside of car.
“I explained to her, like, this is really important work because if the PIT count had existed when mommy was little, she might have been saved sooner,” said Lester. “It wasn’t until something else happened that I was removed from a really horrific situation, right? So the pit count is important to me because I always think, what if we find a little version of me?”
That is only one example of how her experiences shaped her decisions later in life.
“I really felt like my passion very quickly was going to be to give a voice to people that didn’t have a voice because I was that person, and I knew what that felt like,” said Lester.
As she was growing up, she remembers pushing herself to be the perfect kid. She stated that much of it came from fear of abandonment.
“There was always an issue of abandonment and not feeling valued. And so I think I put a lot of pressure on myself really early on to kind of be the representation of what society says a kid should do. So I’m at church all the time. I was in Girl Scouts, I did everything society says you’re supposed to do,” said Lester. “You name it. I did it. Some of it I love, some of it I felt was more like a way to thank my parents for taking a chance on me.”
Through the different activities she joined, she loved choir and going to plays with her mother. So much so that she auditioned for the honor choir. During the audition, she met a young girl in a wheelchair who did not speak clearly, but when she sang had a voice that was “crystal clear.”
“That was the day I decided I wanted to be a special ed teacher. I literally remember going to my mom and being like, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to be a teacher. I kind of knew I was always going to be a teacher, but that was the day I was like, I’m going to be a special ed teacher, and that was my trajectory,” said Lester.
She later went to receive her degree from Cal State Northridge to major in Child Development and African American Studies before going to National University and getting her master’s in Special Education with an emphasis in moderate to severe. She also got another master’s in human development.
“I felt like it was important to understand how a typical child would do, because I spent all this time knee deep in special education. So I got another master’s degree in human development. Because I wanted to really learn more about a typical developing child versus the children I was working with,” said Lester.
She has a third master’s degree in Public Administration with an emphasis in Organizational Leadership, specializing in nonprofits. She also has a business called Growth Consulting Services, where she specializes in “helping organizations navigate their goal and align their vision for the future.”
Her decision to double major in African American Studies was important to her because, although she is mixed with Black and White, she did not grow up in a Black family and wanted to learn more about this history.
Although she is mixed, Lester explained that when she walks out of her front door, the world sees her as a Black woman, and she spoke to some of the experiences she had growing up. She has always felt the fact that she stuck out when in predominantly white spaces and the stares, but the first time she remembered experiencing racism head-on was in middle school.
In seventh grade, she played volleyball and was one of two setters on the team. Typically, during the games, they’d switch them both out, but during one particular tournament at West High, they kept her in for the whole game. Afterwards, a mom she’d known for years, because she had been a room mother, made a comment about it.
“She comes up to me, and she was like, I don’t know why they let niggers play,” she said. “I just remember freezing, like, did she say what I think she just said? Like, is that what just happened?”
Lester explained that her parents were not at that game because they were tending to her brother, who has special needs, so she just stood there crying. She continued to explain that she grew up in a very tight-knit community because outside of school, she just went to church and Girl Scouts, and she did not deal with that language in those places.
“I think at that moment, I really, viscerally felt my differences, and if that’s happening to me, who’s in a basically a bubble most of her life, imagine the people that are just out. That became a really big issue for me to address, I think, because I didn’t think it was fair. And I didn’t think it was right. As I got older, as most of us do, you start to feel the hatred; you can sense it,” said Lester.
Lester did go on to be a teacher; however, she had to stop due to personal circumstances and took time off from working. During her time off, she began taking care of a woman, Kristi, from her church who’d been a theatre teacher at South High and was battling cancer at the time. During the year, she and Kristi bonded over Broadway and singing.
“I really got to appreciate the other end of your life. I had always worked with children. And so I never got to see the other side of that. I kind of worshiped the idea of how she existed, as sick as she was. Wondering if that was something that I could do if I were ever put in that position. Grace. Just never lost her spirit,” said Lester.
Kristi pushed Lester to go back to work, where she became a grant writer for CAPK around 2005. During her time there, Kristi passed away, with Lester and her family at her side as Lester sang Amazing Grace.
“I say all that to say that there is an elegance and a determination that I found in that relationship with her, especially near the end, that I have tried to maintain in the tables I’m allowed to be at,” said Lester.
That determination led her to implement the Black Infant Maternal Health Initiative (BIMHI) in Kern County in 2021 when she worked at First Five Kern and partnered with the Public Health Department. This project was important to her because she drew on her own experiences trying to have a baby.
“I wasn’t originally allowed to have children; that was never the plan. And I think that’s part of the reason why teaching was going to be so important to me, because that was going to be my opportunity to have kids,” said Lester.
She spoke about having health issues, including a spinal disease that came from the trauma of being raped when she was a baby. Prior to having her daughter, she had five miscarriages, and during the process of having her daughter, she stated she was not treated correctly.
“The challenges that I faced [while] having the best insurance, knowing the right people, having the best connections, and then still having crazy challenges and being treated poorly. Really led to a conversation that led to BIMHI’s existence,” said Lester.
She sat down with Brynn Carrigan in 2020 and spoke about the mortality rates of Black women, and Carrigan agreed they needed to take action.
“I call it the love letter to my daughter. I would never want her to go through what I went through. And I think every mother feels that way, and I think every person feels that way,” said Lester. “So if I have the opportunity to make things better for her. Meaning that I’ve made things better for everyone that looks like her. Then I did my job, that my purpose here on this earth. The gift that God gave me was fulfilled. You know, there’s something to knowing that you’re doing the right thing and feeling that you did the right thing. And this is probably one of the few times I’ve felt both.”
