Meet Susan Good

Susan Good was born in Sanger, California to Swiss immigrant parents. She attended Reedley and Sanger public schools and graduated from Sanger High School. Her dream to go to college was threatened when her father was killed in a truck accident the day after her 17th birthday. Thanks to state work study grants and financial aid based on need, Susan was able to complete her degree in 4 years while working a minimum of 15 hours a week. She received her AA from Reedley College, and her BA in Journalism, graduating summa cum laude from Fresno State University. She has also graduated from the Charter Class of Leadership Fresno and the San Joaquin Valley Political Academy. She has lived in Fresno for 35 years with 20 of those years in Fresno City Council District 4

Her interest in business began when she was only 8 years old. She saw an ad in a magazine on how she could purchase a “miracle” salve at a wholesale price of 50 cents each and then resell it for $2.00 a can. Her parents operated a dairy and it wasn’t long until Susan had sold all of her original cans of salve to the many vendors that regularly came to their home. A family friend, seeing her initiative and entrepreneurial savvy, decided to teach her about a new business: how to raise rabbits and sell them for meat and breeding stock. He offered to go into “partnership” with her. She invested $10 in the business (from the money she made on the salve)… and so did he. After a few months of teaching her the business and having confidence in her ability to do it on her own, the friend asked her to “buy him out.” Susan gave him $15 for his original investment and went on to successfully run “Susan’s Rabbitry” for a decade. She became a west coast supplier for a breeder in Ohio and earned about $60 a month, which she used to help offset school expenses and for fun.

With this experience at a young age, Susan Good went on to fulltime employment and garnered nearly two decades of experience in the financial industry, including having served as a senior vice president of a successful local company with more than 100 employees and $100 million in assets. For the past decade, Susan has served the public in a senior position with two State Senators where she has worked to improve our air quality, preserve California agriculture, revitalize downtown and see that the San Joaquin Valley gets its fair share of State resources.

At the age of 20, Susan Good was the youngest member of a city commission in the early 1970’s, having been appointed by Ted Wills to serve on the City’s Historic Preservation Committee. The commission was new and she helped develop the city’s first registry of historic buildings and began, in order of historic priority, the process to place the most historic buildings and residences on the historical register. Susan was appointed by the city to serve on the very first Fresno City-County Commission on the Status of Women at age 24 and a year later, she became the Commission’s Chairwoman. During her tenure, the Commission completed the first city and county workforce and wage study on equal pay for equal work and participated in a program that opened the trades, such as carpenter, electrician, lineman, plumber, to women. The Commission also completed the city’s first sexual harassment survey and conducted follow-up awareness training despite a great deal of opposition and a denial that sexual harassment existed in the workplace.

One example of her fighting for neighborhoods was as a past president and Board Member of the Birchwood Grove Homeowner’s Association. Susan led a citizen effort to have a developer of a nearby strip mall add a 10 year codicil, or court filed conditions document with the title, that they wouldn’t have any stores open past midnight (to stop a liquor store), that they wouldn’t have any stores selling x-rated items or guns and that they wouldn’t have any drive-through windows. That was in the late 1980’s. Susan Good has been married to her husband, David Wilson, for 22 years. Her mother Elsbeth is now 82 and she has one sister, Isabel Good, who is a nurse practitioner and a Lt. Colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve.