Mary Sylla is a lawyer and member of the California Bar with a master’s degree in public health and over 20 years of experience in nonprofit leadership, advocacy, and grant writing. She has successfully written proposals for and managed millions of dollars of county, state and federal funding for nonprofit organizations, including funding for novel public health programs and innovative research to improve medical treatment in jails and prisons. In addition, as a policy advocate, she has successfully lobbied for legislation and budgets requests in California to increase access to syringe services and other public health programs.

Mary is also a local elected official in Marin County, serving on the Board of Directors of the Ross Valley Sanitary District (RVSD) since 2012. During her tenure, the District has emerged as wastewater leader in the region, earning recognition as the Small Collections System of the Year by the California Water Environmental Agency (CWEA) and being awarded for Organizational Excellence by the California Association of Sanitation Agencies (CASA) in 2023. Mary currently serves as President of the Board as well as one of RVSD’s two delegates to the Central Marin Sanitation Agency, the region’s wastewater treatment plant.

Prior to joining RPPG, Mary served as Director of Policy for the National Harm Reduction Coalition and as a Senior Staff Attorney at the Drug Policy Alliance. Earlier in her career, she worked for the U.S. Department of Justice in the Civil Rights Division and for the ACLU of Southern California. Mary also founded a nonprofit organization focused on the public health challenge of HIV in jails and prisons, and she served as an adjunct professor at Touro University California’s School of Public Health.

Mary is a graduate of Brown University, with a law degree from UNC Chapel Hill and a master’s degree in public health from UC Berkeley. In her free time, she enjoys power yoga, swimming, and raising two whip-smart teenagers.