Tara Campbell is a lifelong resident of Yorba Linda and has served on the City Council since 2016 and was first appointed mayor by the council in 2018 when she was just 25 years old. This made her the youngest woman mayor in the history of California, and the youngest female mayor in U.S. history for a city of 30,000 people or more — facts that drew a lot of media attention.
But that attention was not important to Campbell.
“What was big for me was the fact that it was my hometown,” Campbell said. “To be able to be mayor of your hometown, there’s something really special about that. Everybody’s pretty much family and friends to me. And to be able to help people in my community and be mayor of my hometown was the greatest honor.”
Campbell’s family has strong roots in North Orange County, having lived here for more than 35 years. She attended St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School in Yorba Linda and then Rosary Academy in Fullerton.
She applied to colleges in the spring of 2011 and was accepted at University of Southern California for spring 2012 admission. Taking advantage of the extra time during the summer and fall after high school, Campbell took general education classes at Santiago Canyon College, credits which transferred over to USC.
“I really loved my experience at SCC, and it really set me on a great course for my college career,” she said. “I saved a ton of money and got to stay close to home, too.”
As a sports fan and an athlete, Campbell’s goal was to become a sports journalist. “I got to do that for a little bit, reporting from the sidelines for the football team and the basketball team,” she said. “I really loved that, but I thought I better broaden my journalism experience to something other than sports.”
A summer internship for C-SPAN in Washington, DC, fell through at the last minute, so Campbell scrambled and got another at a bipartisan nonprofit that was trying to get members of Congress to work…
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