Lee moved to Maui from California in 1969 to attend Maui Community College. She grew up in a very progressive family that spent many years in the 1950-1960s supporting civil and women's rights. Social justice has permeated Lee's heart from an early age, and has created her path into social work. In the mid-1970's she began working as a court advocate for women and their children housed at the Women Helping Women Shelter. After a few years she became the Hawaii State Representative to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence for a few years. The result of that educational process led her to study with exceptional women leaders in the Domestic Violence movement who began intervention programs to help men who use violence in their intimate relationships to change their behavior. After a 6 month internship in a Minneapolis at a Batterer Intervention Program, Lee returned to Maui and founded the Alternatives to Violence Program serving Maui in 1983. The program soon expanded to Molokai and Lanai. Lee remained the Executive Director until 1992 when she decided to complete her Baccalaureate degree and get a graduate degree in social work knowing that this was her calling in life.
Lee completed her Bachelor's degree in 1995 and moved to Oahu to enter the MSW Program at UH Manoa in 1997. Lee graduated from the program in 1999. As part of her required coursework she spent her 2 years of practicum/internship as the Case Manager for the TJ Mahoney & Associates Halfway House Program for female inmates transitioning into the community in Honolulu. It is a result of that work that she learned about addiction, best practices in addiction and earned and received her CSAC certification working with women incarcerated for substance related crime. A result of that immersion in the challenges women with addiction face, her graduate thesis, "The Psychosocial Needs of Hawaiian Women Incarcerated for Drug-Related Crimes" was published in the Journal of Social Work Practice in the Addictions (Vol. 1 (4) 2001 by the Haworth Press, Inc.
Upon returning to Maui in mid 1999, Lee applied for and was hired as the Executive Director of Malama Na Makua A Keiki (Malama Family Recovery Center). Malama is a gender specific treatment program where women can bring their young children. Lee left Malama at the end of 2000 when she was hired at Maui Community College as a Human Services Program faculty member in 2001. Lee later became the Human Services Program Coordinator until she retired in 2018. She continues to teach as an adjunct one course each spring to help UH Maui students continue on to the BSW and MSW programs with the goal of bringing new and younger workers into the field.
In 2005 Lee was trained in Motivational Interviewing by William Miller, PhD who is the co-founder of Motivational Interviewing. At that time she became a member of the international Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers (MINT). Lee has done numerous trainings in MI across the state for State agencies (CWS) and various non-profit organizations.