In the two months we worked with Charita Law, we learned a lot about her. How deeply she cared about her family and how happy she was to be back in California. How she loved hash browns and tofu and cranberry pita crisps (though she was always willing to share them). How the mere prospect of meeting Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was enough to make her squeal. How working so close to the beach and seeing palm trees out the window made her smile. How she was a night owl, but she was still in a reliably good mood in the mornings (and the afternoons, for that matter). How fantastic she was on social media, how she’d laugh at most of our jokes, how dependable and trustworthy she was, and how lucky we were to have her.

She grew up in the Los Angeles suburb of Cerritos, graduated from UC Berkeley, and moved to Washington, D.C. to work at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. This summer, she returned home to Southern California to be closer to her family.

In October, she applied to become Zócalo’s communications manager. Her resume was impressive, but even more so was her spirit and her instant understanding of our mission to connect broader audiences to ideas and each other. “I know how it feels to attend an event, look around, and realize I’m one of the few non-white (and non-balding) people in the room,” she wrote in her cover letter.

How could we not bring her in for an interview? And—after our conversations with her, in which she confessed that she lacked a filter, laughed easily and often, and said she was game for just about any task—how could we not bring her onboard?

In her first weeks on the job, to our collective delight, Charita proved to be an extraordinary young woman. She was someone with what one of my colleagues called chispa—a spark. She was brilliant and unpretentious, but there was also a gravity, even a solemnity, about her. She was wide-eyed but not naïve: curious, open, cheerful. She worked with joy, she paid attention to detail, and she caught on quickly to the fast pace of our work and to the zaniness and unpredictability of our motley, tight-knit crew. Like the rest of us, she was geeky and quirky and a little bit unconventional.

I sat about five feet away from Charita every day, but only for a few weeks, so the word “love” feels strong. But I can say unreservedly that I—we—loved her unselfish goofiness, her broad smile, and simply having her around. And I can say that because she worked with me at Zócalo. Because she was an unusual person at an unusual place.

Charita died last week, after a fall on New Year’s Eve. She was going to turn 26 later this month.

When someone young dies, one of the countless tragedies is the loss of potential. We feel it acutely at Zócalo right now because, for all we came to love about Charita, what we loved most was all that was next. Next year, she wasn’t going to get lost on the way to the office holiday party. Next month, she was going to come up with an awesome new feature for the site. Next week, she was going to say something totally off-the-wall (again), and we were all going to laugh (again).

People talk a lot about how balancing your life and your work keeps you sane, makes you human. But I’ve found that melding the two—if you work at a place with a mission you believe in and people you come to love—can also make you human. Charita taught me how to write a better tweet. She taught me about how unbridled enthusiasm can change the people around us. She taught me that putting a drop of vanilla extract into your yogurt makes it taste a little like ice cream. She also taught me that it’s OK to say you loved someone, even if you only worked with her, and it was only for a few weeks.

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In other words, I liked my solitary writer’s life. Every spring, I’d attend the annual retreat of the New America Foundation, the Washington-based think tank that supported my work, and that was about all the intellectual community I claimed to need. My closest colleagues, who tended to live thousands of miles away, were a phone call or an email away.

As I look back now, though, it’s clear to me that I longed for some sort of intellectual fellowship closer to home—not an echo chamber, but somewhere I could rub shoulders with thoughtful people of any stripe and hear smart folks expound on things I knew nothing about.

I wasn’t thinking about that in 2002 when I accepted an invitation to attend a snooty L.A. gathering of writer types. I was honored to be a part of the mix, looking forward to some interesting conversations. Instead, a small, untoward comment would wind up shaking me out of my solitary life.

Someone jokingly asked me, in front of a cast of strangers, whether I had been invited “under the Mexican quota.”

It wasn’t like such incidents hadn’t happened before, from time to time, since grade school. But this time it may have been the gap between expectation and reality that set me off. I laughed the comment off in the moment. But within the hour I found myself speeding up the Harbor Freeway, venting on my cell phone to a good friend in New York.

“Goddamn it,” I recall telling her. “What was that, high school?”

And then I blurted out a bizarre pledge that was, to that point in my life, completely out of character. I told my friend that was I going to create and host an intellectual space where no one would be singled out derisively and everyone would be welcome.

Even more shocking is that I followed through. I had the gall (where did that come from?) to meet with the people and organizations around town—some I knew, some I didn’t—I thought could help me make things happen. A filmmaker friend designed a trapezoid logo and gave me a copy of a 19th-century drawing of Mexico City’s zócalo to use for posters, which we had made up at an affordable print shop on Glendale Boulevard in Echo Park. The name Zócalo was meant to convey that the organization would be all about openness and generosity and inclusion. I felt the symbolism of a grand, all-embracing central plaza—the type of public space we long for in L.A.—was perfect.

This founding ethos gave birth to a few principal tenets. The events would be free to the public. Books would be sold, but no one would be obliged to buy one. Every member of the audience would be invited to a reception with speakers where beer and wine and soft drinks would be served, for free. At Zócalo, everyone’s invited to the after-party. (From the beginning, the party included music. For the first however-many events, I borrowed a boom box from a friend and carried it to the venues.) And the events would be about ideas rather than preaching to choirs or heavy-handed advocacy. We’d strive to be inclusive by being broad and general rather than narrow and targeted.

From the beginning, Zócalo strived to mix things up and defy expectations. A lifelong lover of bookstores, I knew few greater joys than entering a shop with one topic in mind but accidentally stumbling upon another. In an age of self-selected, like-minded physical and online communities, Zócalo has sought to preserve a healthy dose of eclectic serendipity. We cater to people who are curious not just about things they already know but also about things they don’t.

I confess I took a perverse pleasure in selecting Adrian Wooldridge, a tweed-bound Brit who is now the management editor at The Economist, to give Zócalo’s first lecture, on the history of the idea of the corporation, before a huge crowd on April 9, 2003 (the gall paid off). From that very first night—10 years ago today—it was clear that Zócalo filled a gaping void in L.A.’s social landscape.

Since then, what started as a lecture series has evolved into a full-fledged Ideas Exchange, with both a physical and a digital platform. In 2003, Zócalo presented four events at one venue in L.A. In 2012, we put on 70 free events in 11 cities and published over 600 articles. We now publish original content every day on our site, and, in keeping with the original goal, we are as proud to curate the voices of neighbors and other community members as we are to publish bold-faced authors. We’re a staff of seven and expect to grow.

I never dreamed of this little project lasting so long or evolving the way it did. Although I’ve learned to enjoy working with other humans, I’ve spent many an hour wondering how the hell my hobby overwhelmed my life and changed the way I spend my days. Fundraising is exactly as fun as you might think it is, and in my darker hours of non-profit angst—believe me, they exist—I sometimes curse our generous partners and our ever-expanding audience for encouraging my accidental activism.

But then I come to my senses and feel grateful. The greatest satisfaction I derive from Zócalo’s story is that the fit of anger that started it all has long since been drowned out by the passion, intelligence, and aspirations of my Zócalo colleagues, past and present. It’s fun to go to work each day with a bunch of cool, creative people—to have helped build the community I never knew I wanted to find. And it is a privilege to play the role of host, both online and on the ground, to audiences across Los Angeles and the world. Zócalo’s success over the past 10 years means I no longer have to lug the boom box, poster, and reservation list to each and every venue by myself. But I would do it again if I had to; it’s all been worth it.

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