RACHELLE HOLMES was a teenager when she first started noticing that her peers and friends from San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood were disproportionately experiencing adverse health problems like cancer and respiratory diseases. 

“I thought cancer was an old people’s disease when I was a kid, and then I had the misfortune of going to school with someone that had cancer. We were teenagers, she had cancer in her jaw,” Holmes said in an interview . “She was born and raised in Bayview, and unfortunately she passed.”

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Alise is a general assignment reporter with a focus on covering government, elections, housing, crime, courts and entertainment in San Francisco and on the Peninsula. Alise is a Bay Area native from San Carlos. She studied history at University of California, Santa Cruz and first started journalism at Skyline College’s school newspaper in San Bruno. She has interned for Bay City News and for Eesti Rahvusringhääling, or Estonian Public Broadcasting. She has covered everything from the removal of former San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus to the divisive battle over the Great Highway on San Francisco’s west side. Please send her any tips.