Linda Champion (she/her/hers), Lawyer & Educator. Linda Champion is an American politician, attorney, opinion columnist and educator. She ran for District Attorney in Suffolk County in Massachusetts in 2018. She is an alumni of the Emerge program for female political candidates and Commonwealth Seminar. She is the assistant general counsel for the Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents and serves on several appointed advisory boards. Early Life Champion is the daughter of an African-American war veteran and a Korean immigrant mother who met while he was fighting in Vietnam. She was raised in Louisiana and Texas before she moved with her mother to Lowell, Mass., in the late 1980s. She graduated from Lowell Middlesex Academy, and moved to Boston when she was 18. Her family experienced poverty and as a teenager, she was homeless. Career Champion graduated from Suffolk University and Suffolk Law School. She worked as an assistant district attorney in the criminal courts under former Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley. She was a professor at Suffolk University for 13 years. In 2013, she became an attorney for the Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents, where she is currently assistant general counsel. She has also worked as a private attorney, specializing in real estate law, consumer protection and community development. She’s also partnered with the City of Boston to teach home ownership programs and been a board member for a subsidiary of the affordable housing nonprofit organization Urban Edge. In 2018, Champion was a candidate for District Attorney in Suffolk County in Massachusetts. She was seeking to be the first female Asian-African American candidate elected to statewide office in Massachusetts, but lost to Rachael Rollins, who was the first woman of color elected as Suffolk County District Attorney. In 2020, Champion graduated from Emerge, a national program that trains female political candidates. She was nominated by the Class of 2020 to continue to serve on their behalf and was appointed to the Mass Emerge Alumni Advisory Board. Champion has also volunteered for several charitable organizations, including fundraising for Thompson Island, The Dimock Center; the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Association; and Chung Changing Lives, a charity run by New England Patriots player Patrick Chung. She serves on several boards, including the Community Advisory Board for GBH public television and radio in Boston and is an appointed alternate to the Equity and Justice For All Task Force in Milton, Mass. In March 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in the United States, Champion led a grassroots effort to coordinate the manufacturing and collection of facemasks in the Asian community to deliver to hospitals and community health centers that were unable to obtain critical personal protective equipment.