OCA Intern Alum: Muttika Chaturabul
Interview by Skyler Murao / Written by Skyler Murao and Kent Tong
WHEN MUTTIKA “TIKA” CHATURABUL WAS JUST A CHILD, she had to learn how to navigate the world without guidance. As a first-generation immigrant born and raised in Thailand who moved to the U.S. when she was ten years old, she was the one who had to translate for her parents and support herself in her studies, enough to get by in school. This challenging upbringing is what drove her to organize mentorship programs for Southeast Asian high school students in the Bay Area while she was an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, so that students with similar backgrounds as herself don’t have to get by on their own.
Her work supporting Southeast Asian students, many of whom grew up surrounded by poverty and violence, combined with her exposure to ethnic studies classes, helped develop Chaturabul’s political consciousness. After graduating with her bachelor’s degree in social welfare, she became a summer intern with the Center for Progressive Leaders in 2010, which placed her to work at OCA National Center in Washington, D.C. That summer spent conducting research on elderly care and writing briefs and memos on K-12 education policy opened new possibilities she’d never imagined for herself. “When I was just in California, you can go into the tech companies, you can go into the nonprofits here or the government agencies, but when you get to D.C., there’s a massive amount of places you can work for: from national organizations, to think tanks, to research institutions that are doing research at a national level, to a senator’s office, you can work for the White House,” she says. “My idea of what kind of impact can be made really expanded.”
When her summer ended, Chaturabul wanted to come back to D.C. full-time. She applied for several jobs there, but when that didn’t pan out, she pivoted to local opportunities, first as an AmeriCorps instructor in Oakland, providing academic support for students with special needs and developing college readiness workshops. After six months, she became the leadership development program coordinator at UC Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education, where she managed an internship program for college students. She would remain at Cal as its program manager for the Public Service Center, which had its own annual summer program that sent students to D.C. While she never got to achieve her goal of working in D.C. post-grad, she describes her program manager experience as “full circle,” because it allowed not just the opportunity for her to visit D.C. every summer, but also to advise students on how to make the most of their internships there.
Tika Chaturabul volunteering with serving meals to homeless people in Berkeley at Dorothy Day House as part of Blue Shield’s community service day
Her OCA internship was Chaturabul’s first time in D.C., and she made sure to take full advantage of the opportunity. She enjoyed being surrounded by so many other transplants, meeting other students of similar age, kayaking together in the Potomac River, attending outdoor movie nights, and grabbing a sweet treat at Georgetown’s Cupcakes. “Some of the core memories were wearing business casual in 108-degree weather, 85% humidity, and sweating in all the wrong places,” she jokes, “and also meeting a ton of people at happy hours and going to a bunch of conferences.” When she sends her own students off to D.C., she always makes sure they walk away with the mindset to “seize” the summer, to “maximize their time”—because it will go by in the blink of an eye.
Since 2020, Chaturabul has been employed as the senior process improvement manager at the nonprofit health plan Blue Shield of California. In her role, she works on initiatives to make healthcare more accessible and processes more efficient, including making it easier for patients to access their records by streamlining data exchange between hospitals and providers, and redesigning payment models so that pay is tied to outcome, keeping physicians accountable in providing good care. “Just because you have healthcare doesn’t mean you have access to care,” she says, “because [if] you don’t know how to use it, then you don't access your healthcare.”
Chaturabul earned her master’s degree in business administration from the University of California, Davis in 2021 and runs her own executive coaching and consulting business on the side. “Coaching has always been a large part of my identity, of what I enjoy in my work,” she says. She started the business because she wanted to help her own peers, those who wanted to be their own boss or discover their own paths. In addition to mentoring high school students in undergrad, mentoring college students for 10 years at Cal, she’s worked in the employee relations team at Blue Shield, coaching employees affected by job terminations through their redeployment within the company. She values the flexibility and autonomy her own business affords her. “Instead of using your intellect in service of another company, you’re using your intellect in service of those you directly want to work with,” she says. She’s inspired by friends who’ve worked for Cal, for other nonprofits, and who’ve left to become entrepreneurs, “leveraging their own brilliance to make impacts in the community in the way that they want.” Like the kid she used to be, Chaturabul is taking charge of her own path.