Risa Mednick
2019 Candidate for Cambridge City Council

Home address:
20 Maple Ave., Unit C
Cambridge, MA 02139

Contact information:
website: https://www.risaforcambridge.org/
Twitter: @RisaMednick
e-mail: risa@risaforcambridge.org
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RisaforCambridge/

Send contributions to:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/committee-to-elect-risa-mednick

Risa Mednick is a new candidate this year.

Background
I have lived and worked in Cambridge for over twenty years—in Strawberry Hill, East Cambridge, and now in the middle, between Inman, Central and Harvard Squares. I’ve spent my entire career working with progressive, mission-driven nonprofit organizations in intersecting human rights arenas including, reproductive health care, labor rights, economic empowerment, human trafficking intervention, and domestic violence and sexual assault prevention. Connecting the dots between issues, identifying opportunities, and organizing collaborations to create change is what I do best.

For over a decade, my focus has been on Cambridge. I have already worked with every member of the City Council, the City Manager, and department heads on policies and practices that make our community safer, healthier, and more just:

• From 2008-2018, I led Transition House, a Cambridge nonprofit organization with a mission to end domestic violence.
• I partnered with policy makers to increase resources for support services and helped create a city-wide Domestic and Gender Based Violence Prevention Initiative and a trauma-informed law enforcement partnership.
• I worked with the Cambridge Housing Authority to include domestic violence as an emergency status category and created a pathway to stable, affordable housing options for survivors.
• I successfully advocated to include homeless shelters in energy efficiency programs to reduce costs and their carbon footprints.
• I co-founded the Cambridge Nonprofit Coalition and partnered with city leaders on a comprehensive Community Needs Assessment to drive decision making about how to use community benefits to solve community problems.
• I have been appointed to serve on 10 city task forces and committees addressing public safety, out-of-school-time services, environmental sustainability, income inequality, pay equity, community benefits, public health, long range planning, and violence intervention and prevention.

Why I’m Running
A city of great wealth and resources has the corresponding responsibility to use them to benefit everyone and to be accountable for changing practices and policies. I am running for Cambridge City Council because I believe our elected and municipal leaders must be driven by moral values that focus on social equity to upend racism, oppression and poverty. It’s the only way our whole community can thrive.

Focus on Racial Equity, Social Justice & Poverty Alleviation
Prioritizing the needs of those who have the least will transform the way policies are proposed and considered, programs and services are designed, and budgets are created. A true social equity focus in government must also transform resident access to decision making.

I believe our city needs to invest deeply in holistic poverty alleviation, implement affordable housing and tenant protections, universal pre-K and eliminating the racial achievement gap in our schools, municipal broadband, drastically improved transportation infrastructure, climate change mitigation, increased mental health services and support for the multi-sector human service safety net our community depends on, as well as sustaining the small businesses and arts that enliven Cambridge.

Creating a Culture of Accountability in City Government
With decades of collaborative social change leadership experience, I would work with council members to reframe the leadership culture in City Hall so that our community can hold its government accountable to enacting and enforcing policy strategies that solve community problems.

To do this, we need to change the culture in City Hall.

• We need the City Council to become an assertive body that can collaborate to meet its goals and work in productive partnership with the City Manager to lead the city in confronting the complex challenges before it.
• We need to recalibrate the decision making relationship between the City Council and the City Manager role and approach the search process and hiring of the next city manager with new expectations.
• We need to use the city budget as a tool for progressive change, investing wisely in services and programs that will make all of these goals possible.
• We must have rigorous evaluations of each city department and its programs to understand what works and what doesn’t, which resources are valued by the community most and which are outdated or simply not useful. We will do this through an equity lens and be accountable to the findings.
• We must also work across sectors to maximize available resources. This requires establishing transparent goals and practices for community benefits negotiations with developers and corporations as well as re-formulating PILOT contracts with Harvard and MIT so that benefits delivered address established community need.

This is my strategy for authentic change in Cambridge. It’s not complicated. It requires will and collaboration.

CCTV candidate video (2019)