Healing from the outside in
Graduating UW Tacoma senior Kailey Lawless is helping others use education to start over — just like she did.
Despite a difficult past that others might not share so openly, Kailey Lawless, ’26, is disarmingly honest.
“I’m just built differently,” the UW Tacoma senior says, laughing. “I’m an open book about everything and anything. If you ask me a question, I’m going to give you a straight-up answer.”
After years spent battling addiction, homelessness and the justice system, Lawless turned to education for a fresh start. Her willingness to be vulnerable about her past, combined with her absolute love of education, has helped her forge a future focused on helping others.
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Woman wearing graduate cap and gown in front of stairs
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Woman wearing graduate attire in front of W statue
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Woman wearing graduate cap and gown posing with flowers
Lawless has spent the past two years at UW Tacoma defying odds and winning awards. She's been named a Dressel Scholar, Asian Pacific Islander American Scholar, 2025 Chancellor and Governor’s Civic Leader and, most recently, UW Tacoma’s Chancellor’s Medalist and Husky 100 honoree.
Navigating survival
“When I think about it, I don’t even know where to begin,” she says. “I started having a rough time during my teenage years, but school was always the one thing I was good at.” Lawless’ “rough time” constituted more than your typical teenage rebellion. She was so good at school that she regularly got bored. Boredom led to troublemaking, which led to hanging out with “the wrong crowd” and everything that can come with that: drug addiction, abusive relationships, court involvement. In 2012, she dropped out of the alternative high school she had landed in by senior year. (“I did great on my GED!” she says. “It wasn’t ever the academics that I had trouble with — it was everything else.”)
A few difficult years later, she got pregnant and completed a court-ordered drug rehab program. But it didn’t stick. With her daughter in the care of her grandparents, Lawless spent the next several years “just navigating survival.” It wasn’t until the birth of her son in 2022 that she decided her life needed to change — not because a judge demanded it, but because she desperately sought a future beyond her present.
“At that time, I had lost so much. The world was falling apart around me,” she says. But her grandparents — always in her corner — offered her a soft place to land after leaving the hospital with her baby boy.
“That was the point where I thought, ‘School has always been my one thing.’ I knew I could go work at a restaurant, make decent money, but that isn’t going to be a career; it’s not going to be fulfilling, and it’s not going to support my kids,” she says. “I didn’t know what it would look like to be newly sober and have a criminal history and have a baby. But I told my counselor, ‘I wanna be you. You look like you have a decent life, and I know I can do this with my background.’”
“School has always been my one thing. I knew I could go work at a restaurant, make decent money, but that isn’t going to be a career; it’s not going to be fulfilling, and it’s not going to support my kids.”
Navigating healing
Wanting to follow her counselor’s path, Lawless enrolled at Tacoma Community College in the Human Services Professional program, which taught her about social work, mental health and addiction services. Beyond her classes, she got hyper-involved: She helped launch a campus 12-step program for recovering drug and alcohol users, acted as Phi Theta Kappa honors society president and student government senator. An internship with Child Protective Services took her back to the same office that had opened a case against her when her son was born — a real full-circle moment. “That’s really where I started to think ‘I don’t want anyone to go through what I went through and struggle even more because they’re afraid to utilize the help they’re given,’” she says.
With the help of UW Tacoma’s Office of First Gen, she transferred in 2024 and is graduating with her Bachelor of Arts in Social Welfare with minor in criminal justice this June. If TCC taught her to walk, UW Tacoma turned her into an ultramarathoner — she has acted as a peer navigator to help students with similar life experiences, interned at Tacomaprobono Community Lawyers, and has won so many awards she’s almost lost track: Dressel Scholar, Asian Pacific Islander American Scholar, 2025 Chancellor and Governor’s Civic Leader Awards and, most recently, UW Tacoma’s Chancellor’s Medal and Husky 100.
Lawless has turned her life around due in no small part to being a mother and wanting to show up as a role model for her kids, Logan (age 3) and Khloe (age 11).
One of Lawless’ proudest achievements was resurrecting and running the Formerly Incarcerated Student Association, a registered student organization at UW Tacoma that “creates a space of belonging among peers,” she says. She also worked as one of the first peer navigators of the Husky Post Prison Pathways program (under the guidance of mentor Omari Amili), which provides holistic support for individuals as they transition from prison to college to career. These positions uniquely set her up for her current role: Since February, she’s been working as Pierce College’s community-based education navigator, helping others impacted by the justice system (whether directly or indirectly) and setting them on a path to success, like hers.
Lawless will be attending Vermont Law and Graduate School remotely this fall, taking the first step toward her goal of eventually practicing law. In the meantime, she’s enjoying the grassroots work of helping individuals rather than changing systems.
“I’ve seen how much education has changed my life, and being able to provide that for somebody else is really rewarding,” she says. “It goes with that line, ‘if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.’ I love what I do, and what I do is healing — and it’s healing me at the same time.”
Story by Chelsea Lin // Top photo by University Photography, others courtesy of Kailey Lawless
Originally published June 2026
