About Ryan

Home truly means Nevada for Ryan.

It’s where he started his small business in 2019 and married his husband Sean in 2023, where he frequents dog parks with his three-year-old boxer Quincy, and where he is always on the lookout for local restaurants or ice cream parlors to frequent. It’s also where he started a nonprofit organization advocating for people with addiction and mental health challenges.

Ryan knows firsthand the challenges that families face around kitchen tables every night.

He and his youngest sister were raised by his mother, a public-school teacher who often took on second or third jobs to support their family. She would come home at 10pm, exhausted from working night school after teaching all day. Year-round, she kept a sign over the mantle with one word: Believe.

Ryan sat next to his mother at the kitchen table while she juggled the bills—her, balancing the checkbook and him, diligently finishing his homework after making sure his little sister got hers squared away, too. At that table, Ryan learned that it isn’t what you have that matters. It’s what you care about that's priceless.

Ryan’s values were forged in a family deeply rooted in the union movement. His mom is a lifelong teacher's union member, and his father was Teamster who drove cross-country for Mayflower until his untimely death in Ryan's teens.

With his father absent during his teenage years due to the demands of his cross-country work, Ryan’s mother and grandmother taught him what do-your-part resilience looks like. They worked together as a family, each person pitching in to help the others. Ryan often picked up his youngest sister at school on his bike and cared for her in the afternoons. Sometimes, it was a hard road.

But Ryan also learned from his mother and grandmother how to believe in people before they believe in themselves. At one of his lowest moments, Ryan’s mother took the Believe sign off the wall and handed it to him. She said, “This is why I know you will be okay. Just take the next right step and believe.” Ryan passes on that same spark of belief within the communities he works with every day.

From the strong role models of his mother and grandmother, Ryan has built on the foundation of faith in people. Following in his family’s footsteps, Ryan dedicated his early twenties to organizing for workers' rights, helping nurses secure their right to form a union and aiding Wal Mart workers in their quest to organize for fair wages and better working conditions. These experiences cemented his deeply held belief in the dignity of organized labor and the power of collective action.

Like many in our state and across the country, in his twenties, Ryan went through a period of addiction after being prescribed painkillers for a hiking injury.

To get healthy again, he learned to navigate a complex and unfriendly healthcare system. Instead of support, he encountered a complex, unfriendly, ill-informed system. He saw how insurance companies exploit hard-working people by refusing to cover life-saving treatments. Medicaid saved his life, and Ryan made it his mission to help others.

Advocacy became Ryan's purpose and passion.

Ryan entered recovery in 2015 and immediately began organizing others to make changes to save lives. He felt he’d found his true calling: speaking the truth, bringing people together, and demanding fair treatment for those pushed aside by our healthcare system. He founded Mobilize Recovery, which is now the largest and most influential recovery advocacy network in the United States.

Within three years, he met thousands of people who shared their experiences about how addiction impacted their communities. He traveled across the United States to talk with families and people, learning about the gaps in our systems and how we can fix them. He was inspired to work for change at a higher level by lifting these many voices. Ryan’s belief in big ideas helped him lead a team of advocates around the country, who successfully championed hundreds of pieces of legislation to offer addiction support services. And after the tragic death of one of his closest friends in 2017, he helped to bring corporations and nonprofits together to offer 1 million lifesaving units of the overdose medication Naloxone in 24 states at zero cost.

In 2018, Ryan connected online with a mother whose son died of an overdose. They put their heads together to organize a large-scale action at Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin. Together, they organized over 500 people outside of Purdue to demand accountability, share their stories, push for resources, and stand in solidarity with survivors.

As a prominent face and voice of recovery advocacy, Ryan kept pushing forward—without compromising his values. He put community first, trusting that direct action and policy could go hand in hand. He helped to write lifesaving legislation to protect consumers, testified at state legislatures and at congress, and participated in court depositions on behalf of families and survivors. In 2019, he was appointed by the U.S. Department of Justice to represent over 120,000 victims in the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy case—the biggest in American history. Accepting this unpaid commitment wasn’t about politics for Ryan. Instead, it was about his dedication to helping others. Victims and families’ interests were foremost, as he worked with Attorneys Generals from across the nation to make sure people’s needs came before government needs.

Ryan is ready to fight for Nevada and lead with values that benefit all of us.

We're a “can-do” state where big ideas are possible—and Ryan has the experience to bring kitchen-table wisdom to our State Assembly. He knows that small changes add up to visionary transformations. Like fighting insurance companies for mental health parity, to ensure that mental health is treated as health. Or making sure that housing is attainable and quality healthcare is accessible to everyone.

Creating change means balancing Nevada’s checkbook so there’s enough to go around—from creating jobs and lowering costs to taking care of our seniors and improving our public schools. Together, we can address the challenges that impact our community instead of sweeping people under the rug. Ryan’s expertise, caring, and deep commitment to community comes from more than a decade of experience. And he has the grit, know how, and passion to get things done—for us.