The Power of a Story: Melanie’s Fight for Women and Families
Melanie Call’s advocacy began with a personal battle that revealed both the harsh realities women face in the workplace and her own resilience. A first-generation Latina, mother, entrepreneur, and civic leader, Melanie has built a career spanning technology, healthcare, education, nonprofit leadership, and community organizing. But her path into public advocacy became deeply personal when she experienced pregnancy discrimination in the workplace. At the time, she did not fully understand her legal rights or the protections that existed for pregnant workers. Like many women, she tried to stay professional and simply push through the experience.
“I didn’t know this was against the law. HR is not your friend, and I wish we did more to prep women in the workforce. "I just tolerated bad behavior and powered through it. You just work and power through it. You keep telling yourself it's not gender discrimination," she recalls. That moment of injustice became a catalyst. What began as pain and confusion grew into a fierce commitment to advocate for women, mothers, caregivers, and families navigating systems that too often fail to see them.
Discovering the Power of Storytelling
Melanie’s decision to share her story publicly marked the beginning of her transformation from silent suffering to public advocacy. Her experience was published in The 19th News, where she found solidarity with others facing similar challenges, especially women of color who often experience compounded discrimination.
"I felt really empowered telling my story, with experts saying out loud that I had, in fact, been mistreated in the workplace and explaining which laws had been broken—or needed to exist."
Through storytelling, Melanie discovered that lived experience can become a powerful tool for leadership. Her story helped other women feel less alone and gave her a deeper understanding of how personal narrative can build awareness, community, and change.
Her advocacy soon expanded beyond pregnancy discrimination to address systemic issues, including childcare, paid leave, workplace equity, maternal justice, and economic security. As a mother, Melanie saw firsthand how impossible the system can feel when parents are expected to work as if they do not have children and parent as if they do not have jobs.
“They just want you to work like you have no children and forget we all came from someone who cared for them at some point in their life," she says. The high cost and limited availability of childcare became central to her advocacy. She began speaking publicly about how childcare costs can exceed mortgage payments, college tuition, or even a family's monthly income, forcing families, especially mothers, to make impossible choices.
From Personal Story to National Advocacy
Melanie was introduced to the Westside Leadership Institute in 2023 at a community event in Millcreek and enrolled in the Fundamentals and Startups programs in 2024. She entered the program with lived experience, professional skills, and a passion for justice, but she was still learning how policy systems worked. “I had no idea how politics work, or how to implement policy, to draft a bill or to write a bill or anything like that,” she admits.
The Fundamentals course helped break down complex policy language into something more accessible. Melanie learned more about how local government works, how to communicate advocacy goals, how to understand public process, and how to move from awareness into action. She valued how the program created a supportive community where classmates shared projects, resources, and encouragement. WLI helped her connect her lived experience and professional expertise with the practical tools needed to navigate policy, public leadership, and community change.
Equipped with those tools, Melanie expanded her advocacy beyond sharing her own story to influencing policy and helping families navigate the systems that shape their daily lives.
She began testifying before Utah lawmakers on childcare policy, including advocacy related to H.B. 190, the Child Care Business Tax Credit, and worked with organizations at the local, state, and national levels to advance policies supporting working families.
Her work has taken her to Washington, D.C., where she has participated in national care economy initiatives and collaborated with organizations including MomsRising, National Parents Union, Community Change Action, Mothering Forward, Utah Care for Kids, National Domestic Workers Alliance, UnidosUS, and Moms First.
Melanie’s advocacy has also brought her into conversations connected to the White House Gender Policy Council. She has spoken publicly about childcare, motherhood, and economic justice—including speaking after Senator Bernie Sanders at a national gathering.
Despite these accomplishments, Melanie believes leadership begins with ordinary people sharing their lived experiences.
"I think when you express your story, it gives other people permission to kind of put that wall down."
She wants more parents, caregivers, Latinas, and working families to understand that they do not need formal policy training to influence change.
"You don't need to have a master's in public policy to speak up and talk about what impacts you every day."
For Melanie, advocacy is about making policymaking more accessible by helping people understand how decisions are made and how they can participate before those decisions become final.
"I think what helps is how to read a bill, how to propose a bill, and how the structure of this House and Senate work."
What began as one woman telling the truth about her own experience has grown into a platform for empowering others to use their voices and helping shape policies that affect families across the country.
Advocacy Beyond Politics
Beyond policy, Melanie channels her advocacy into entrepreneurship through Bonita Paper Co., a bilingual Spanglish paper goods brand rooted in creativity, culture, affirmation, and Latin American pride. Through journals, writing workshops, stationery, stickers, affirmation cards, and other creative products, Bonita Paper Co. celebrates identity, healing, self-expression, and personal empowerment.
The brand reflects Melanie’s belief that advocacy does not only happen in policy rooms. It can also happen through art, language, culture, storytelling, and the way people see themselves. Bonita Paper Co. reminds women and girls that their voices, stories, and dreams matter.
Melanie is also building iTestify: Voices United, a civic engagement platform inspired by years of navigating public meetings, legislative hearings, testimony deadlines, and advocacy campaigns. With her background in technology and project management, she is working to make civic participation easier to access, especially for communities that have historically been left out of decision-making spaces.
Her greatest achievement, she says, is fostering a community where people feel empowered to use their voices. “To give themselves permission to speak,” Melanie explains, is a transformative act of leadership.
Melanie hopes her work creates a legacy for her children and future generations. By bringing her children into advocacy days, community events, and civic conversations, she is showing them that leadership is not about having the perfect title or the most prestigious credentials. It is about caring enough to act, learning as you go, and refusing to stay silent when something needs to change.
Melanie Call’s story is one of turning adversity into action and personal pain into collective progress. Through her journey with WLI and beyond, she demonstrates that leadership can begin with one mother telling the truth, finding her voice, and deciding that no one else should have to fight alone.
This profile was researched and written by University of Utah students Hayllen Meneses Rosas and Joaquin Lopez Huertas based on interviews conducted as part of the WLI Alumni Profile Series. The series explores how WLI graduates apply leadership skills developed through the Westside Leadership Institute to strengthen their communities. The project is led by Dr. Stacy Harwood and supported by funding from the College of Architecture + Planning Research Incentive Seed Grant Program and the University Neighborhood Partners Community Scholar in Residence Program at the University of Utah.
