Candidate for
Council Member; City of Berkeley; Council District 7

My mission as a City Council member is to help the public in every way i can through constituent services. Helping individual people and groups, social movements. I am more focused on addressing real world problems and helping people find solutions and getting the bureaucracy to respond than I am on an abstract intellectual construct. I started out in the Civil Rights Movement and the Peace Movement, so those two movements formed the core of my ideas. I have worked very hard on serving all the people, no matter what their philosophy might be.

For multiple years I worked as a daycare teacher, home health care worker, and as Manager or Executive Director of multiple nonprofit groups. These included homes for mentally retarded adults, shelters for homeless women, a youth hostel, housing co-ops, food co-ops, a neighborhood revitalization association, and a U.C. student housing co-op. As a city council member since 1996, I have appointed more students, Asians, Latinos, and Native Americans to city commissions and city internships than has any other Council member, and our office has empowered hundreds of interns to transform their ideas into policy for the City Council' consideration and vote.

Berkeley's three largest organizational challenges are budgets (especially short and medium term Health Department funding), management treatment of employees and the public, and long term capital and operational needs and issues, including the confusion and complexity of the zoning process. Our greatest budget successes have come from working with unions, nonprofits, and activists, and I will continue to work with them, promoting their needs and ideas. I am working with the NAACP to address the mistreatment of employees and to document the problems and to propose solutions. Regarding zoning, I have suggested a series of improvements that will save both the public and the City employees from stress regarding the zoning process.