Mayor Karen Bass

Karen Bass’s roots in LA go deeper than politics. She was a community organizer on the streets of South Los Angeles, a nurse in the NICU, and a frontline caregiver in the LA County hospital emergency room.

So, it’s no surprise that she took on and started solving the big challenges past mayors avoided — changing Los Angeles by bringing homelessness down, making LA safer, and building more housing after so many years of City Hall failure.

Karen Bass is the first woman ever elected to lead the city. Before taking office, she represented Los Angeles in Congress and served as Speaker of the California State Assembly — the first Black woman in U.S. history to lead a state legislative body.