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MEET CRYSTAL LETT

Crystal Lett is Hilliard born and Hilliard raised — a graduate of Hilliard Davidson High School who grew up loving the open, welcoming spirit of Central Ohio. She never really left. After earning her degree in Political Science from The Ohio State University in 2008, she planted her career right where her heart was: working with kids who needed someone in their corner.
That calling was personal. Crystal’s brother, David, lived with serious mental health and substance use challenges, and being his advocate shaped the rest of her life. Out of college, she took a job as a Case Manager at North Central Mental Health, working with young people ages 14 to 21 living with severe mental illness. Day after day, she stitched together the safety net around them — schools, housing providers, faith communities, nonprofits, doctors, neighbors — anyone who could help a kid stay healthy and rooted in their community.
Then came 2011, the hardest and brightest year of her life. Just one month before the birth of her son Noble, Crystal lost David to suicide. Soon after Noble arrived, he was diagnosed with a complex genetic disorder and Autism. Crystal stepped away from her caseload at NCMH to care for him full time, taking on flexible part-time work as the Client Services Manager at a financial advisory firm so she could effectively care for Noble’s needs. In the years that followed, she became an expert in something no parent ever expects to study — how to get a child the right resources in a system that does not always make it easy.

Even while caring for Noble, Crystal couldn’t quite walk away from the people she’d served as a case manager. She joined a psychological practice as a manager so she could keep one foot inside the mental health community she loved.

After 2016, her advocacy went national. As a volunteer with Save the Children Action Network, Crystal traveled to Washington again and again, lobbying for the Social Impact Partnerships to Pay for Results Act to fund early childhood education, and for the REACH Every Mother and Child Act, a five-year strategy to end preventable child and maternal deaths globally by 2030. When the first Trump administration came after CHIP funding, Crystal stepped up alongside Nationwide Children’s Hospital and the Children’s Hospital Association. Senator Sherrod Brown heard her family’s story and asked her to keep telling it — and for seven months, the two of them held press conferences, wrote op-eds, sat for radio interviews, and refused to let the CHIP deadline pass quietly. From 2017 to 2021 she also ran The Salon Lab Columbus, a bipartisan on-ramp for women curious about politics.
In 2018, she kept pushing — back to D.C. to relaunch the REACH Act and (successfully) to double the budget for Child Care Development Block Grants, then home to Central Ohio to host canvasses, run phone banks, and volunteer for Beth Liston, Danny O’Connor, and Democrats up and down the ticket. After the midterms, she helped found the Dublin Area Progressives so the energy of that fall didn’t drain back out of the community. That same year she joined Protect Our Care to defend the Affordable Care Act, earning a resolution from Columbus City Council in support of CHIP and taking the case to local press.

Crystal has fought for paid parental leave, universal pre-K, reproductive rights, and justice for survivors of sexual assault. In 2022, as Ohio Program Director of Red Wine & Blue, she rallied suburban women into a political force, helping drive a national conversation about book banning in schools and libraries and organizing parents to push back on extremist policies aimed at their kids’ classrooms. In 2023, she became Recruitment Director at LEAD Ohio, helping build the bench of pro-democracy candidates Ohio desperately needs — and 80% of the candidates LEAD Ohio trained that cycle won their races.

Serving Ohio's 11th District (2025–2026)

On January 1, 2025, Crystal was sworn in as the State Representative for Ohio’s 11th House District in the 136th General Assembly — and the work she’d been doing as a volunteer, a parent, and a caseworker walked into the Statehouse with her. She serves as Ranking Member of the House Children and Human Services Committee, where her years inside the youth mental health system give her a perspective most legislators don’t have. She also sits on the House Medicaid Committee and the House Small Business Committee.

Her first-term legislative record reads like the rest of her life: focused on the people. She sponsored House Bill 136, the Fairness Act, to extend long-overdue civil rights protections to LGBTQ+ Ohioans in employment, housing, and public accommodations. With Representative Munira Abdullahi, she introduced legislation to stop health insurance companies from overriding the professional judgment of licensed medical providers — a fight she has lived as both a clinician’s colleague and as Noble’s mom. With Representative Christine Cockley, she filed a bill requiring data centers to publicly report monthly and yearly water consumption and barring them from hiding water use inside NDAs with local governments — a transparency measure aimed squarely at the build-out reshaping Central Ohio.

She co-sponsored House Bill 542, the “Uncounted” bill, requiring Ohio to track pregnancy outcomes inside its jails and prisons so incarcerated women actually receive prenatal care. And in April 2026, after the Marshall Project–Cleveland reporting exposed escalating violence at Mohican Young Star Academy, the state’s largest youth residential treatment facility, Crystal introduced House Bill 811. The bill strips the Ohio Department of Behavioral Health of the discretion to look the other way and requires it to suspend admissions, deny license renewals, or shut facilities down after serious violations. As Crystal put it, the bill is “the immediate off switch for bad actors.” To see Rep. Lett’s full legislative record, you can visit: https://ohiohouse.gov/members/crystal-lett

One thread runs through all of it. From the kids on her caseload, to her brother, to her son, to the families showing up at her district office today, Crystal Lett fights for the people who need a champion — because she knows, in her bones, that strong families build a stronger Ohio.