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Part 1 - Adrienne Abramson Mandel was born in Irvington, New Jersey in 1936. She grew up in Hillside, New Jersey, and attended Hillside High School. Ms. Mandel devoted much of her youth to the B'nai B'rith Girls, one of the youth arms of the B'nai B'rith Jewish service organization. In 1954, Ms. Mandel enrolled in Rutgers-Newark to study pre-law. She graduated in 1958 and married her husband, Manny, in November of that year while also working as a parole officer in Camden. By the early 1960s, Ms. Mandel had moved to Cleveland, Ohio, and raised her children while working part-time in Detroit and doing volunteer work for the League of Women Voters in Cleveland. After Ms. Mandel's husband finished graduate school, he was offered a job with the National Office of the B'nai B'rith Youth Organization in Washington D.C. In 1972, Ms. Mandel and her family moved to Silver Spring, Maryland.
Part 2 - Adrienne Mandel began her political career in Washington, DC, after moving to Silver Spring, Maryland, in 1972. In the following few years, Ms. Mandel started working for various federally-funded civil service departments in Montgomery County. She had gotten a job at the Holiday Park Senior Center, where she worked with the recreation center programs for senior citizens, until moving to a position in the Office of State Affairs in Montgomery County. In October of 1984, Ms. Mandel began her work as a lobbyist in the Office of State Affairs, where she worked for ten years, aiding in supporting the State Delegates in Annapolis with department research. She would go on to run as a Democrat for one of the Delegate seats of Montgomery County in 1994. She was elected and built a distinguished career. She became President of the Women's Caucus a few years later, dedicating herself to women's issues and community advocacy. In 1997, Ms. Mandel pioneered a new driver's licensing law for the State of Maryland, which extended the requirements to earn a driver's license. Her work on this new law gave way to other states passing similar laws in 1997. She also contributed to solving Maryland's nursing crisis, crafting legislation to give the hospitals the nurses they desperately needed and expanding Maryland's healthcare benefits. Ms. Mandel retired in November of 2015. She participated in the Women's March in 2017 with her daughter and continues to express her support for women's issues to this day.