“When I stand up as a secular person, I can use my privilege to highlight the fact that there are MANY voices at the table—Muslim, Buddhist, Shamanist, Agnostic—and they all deserve to be heard as well. When we design our laws to not favor one group, we make it easier for all groups to exist and thrive.”
Representative Athena Hollins was first elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2020, and was re-elected in 2022. She serves in House leadership as Majority Whip and as Vice Chair of the Rules and Legislative Administration Committee. She also serves on the Committees on Property Tax Division, Climate and Energy Finance and Policy, and Public Safety Finance and Policy. She is also a co-chair of the Minnesota Secular Government caucus.
Hollins grew up in rural Hawaii and is the proud daughter of a small-business-owning veteran and a social worker. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in 2005 from Reed College, where she started her activism by volunteering with the Queer Alliance, Amnesty International, and the Feminist Student Union. She then earned a scholarship to the University of St. Thomas law school, where she earned her J.D. in 2011. In law school, she continued her student organizing work on the Lawyer’s Council on Social Justice, the Black Law Students Association, and Out!Law, the LGBTQ+ student association. During law school, she interned at the Minneapolis Department of Civil Rights and the Midwest Coalition for Human Rights.
After passing the bar exam, she worked in family law, helping people struggling with substance abuse, domestic violence, and immigration issues. She then spent four years at Thomson Reuters in community relations, where she managed community grants and giving, employee volunteer activities, and diversity and inclusion efforts.
Inspired to make her neighborhood a great place for her first daughter Hypatia to grow up in, she joined the Payne-Phalen Community Council, where she was elected as president within a year. During her time serving on the Council, she increased the board’s diversity and recruited people that had not previously been involved in neighborhood decision making, transforming it into a majority minority board.
Sarah Levin: What motivated you to run for office?
Rep. Athena Hollins: It sounds simple, but my children honestly motivated me to run for office. My first instance of realizing that I needed to get more involved, was when my five-year-old daughter refused a Happy Meal, because she didn’t want to contribute to more plastic being in the world. I have never been so proud and also so sad in one singular moment. I realized that this wasn’t her responsibility—she had inherited the issue of climate change, just like I had. But that cycle would stop with me. I would do everything in my power so that she wouldn’t have to still be fighting these battles when she is thirty-five years old.
Rep. Athena Hollins identifies as an agnostic and serves as a co-chair of Minnesota Secular Government Caucus. This article was originally published as part of the Representation Matters series in The Humanist magazine, a publication of the American Humanist Association. Continue reading the full interview here.
Rep. Hollins was re-elected in 2024 to a two-year term. This is her third term.
You can view all secular elected officials currently serving across the nation on The Secular Vote’s map of secular elected officials here.
