Eight years ago, we met Verleana Green in the library at McClymonds High School in West Oakland where she was a 17 year old cheerleader and an honor student. She said then that she wanted to be a lawyer. Now she is.

This is a story that took eight years to finish. That's how long we've followed a student who rose above. Verleana came from one of the toughest neighborhoods in the Bay Area to the University of San Francisco, and graduated with a law degree in 2005.

It was a daring, almost audacious dream for a little girl growing up poor in west Oakland. "Since I was eight years old, I've always wanted to be an attorney and it feels great," Green said.

Raised by a single mom, there was no money. Verleana remembers her mother not eating so her children would have enough food. "Since her income was the only one coming into the household, there would be nothing. No food. No electricity. No water," Green said in 1998. "There was nothing."

And just outside their door, Verleana saw the crime most of us only hear about on the news. Throughout it all, Verleana held tight to her mother's advice. "I didn't achieve my goals so I really want you to achieve your goal. I want you to go to college," said her mother, Verlean Grant.

Going from a high school with a 60 percent dropout rate to UC Berkeley, Verleana had to play academic catch up and working her way through college was a struggle. "I really thought about not finishing school. I thought about the financial issues I was going through and I wondered if could really withstand it.”

But Verleana responded to those moments with a deep strength. In a recent speech, she talked about that: "It was my mom's faith that kept me going. Her message that I could do anything I wanted. I believed her." That faith carried her from Cal to USF law school.

"You know how many lawyers come from West Oakland? None. Well, I said, I am going to be there first. I am going to be the first one who says it can be done."

Verleana is now currently working in the legal department at Robert Half International and she just passed the California State Bar.

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