‘City Government Is What Impacts Our Lives’.

Jessica Taubner (SPH’07) Alumna; Chief of Staff to Boston City Councilor At-Large Ayanna Pressley

Hometown: Mount Vernon, Maine

Breakfast: Turkey sausage, sautéed kale, and a corn tortilla (“Homemade—I spend a lot of time on my food!”)

Nicknames: “Ayanna has a number of nicknames for me. ‘Beast’ is one of them, and I think it’s hysterical because I’m like five feet tall. I believe she (and many others) call me Beast because of the ferocity with which I approach matters I care deeply about. Her first slogan for me was ‘Tiny but Mighty.’”

What led you from studying maternal and child health to working in politics and policy?

The summer before I was enrolled at SPH was when George W. Bush was up for reelection. I was in my mid to late 20s at the time, and up until that point could have been described as a stereotypical, apathetic 20-something. I didn’t understand what big federal politicians were going to do to help or hurt me, either way.

Then watching that election, it was the first time I felt—particularly as a woman—that there was a possibility for great harm here. I literally got this visceral feeling in the pit of my stomach, like, “I don’t feel OK about this,” but I wasn’t really sure what to do with it.

That fall I started at SPH, and Sophie Godley—now a professor—came in to talk about her policy and advocacy work at the time at AIDS Action Committee. I remember thinking, “Oh, wait a second, that’s what I want to do.”

What led you to city government?

I did a couple of phone banks for John Kerry, and after he lost the election I got an email from him saying, “Don’t give up. Go to your local caucuses.” So I showed up at my local Ward 19 Democratic caucus.

There was a big City Council race, so I just got involved in the committee. Sam Yoon was running for City Council for the first time, and he ended up being elected. I was really drawn to him because he wanted to change how government is run, to make government more open and accessible to the everyday person.

When I was finishing my degree, I chose to do my practicum at the State House, because I knew there were lots of different players in the policy world, and I didn’t know who I wanted to be, but I knew at the State House I would see most of the players on the spot. I went and did my practicum with the Public Health Committee, and I did love the work. I got to help write some meaty legislation that presumably impacts people’s lives—but I never saw them and I never talked with them. I felt really disconnected. So when Sam ran for mayor in 2009, I went back and worked on his campaign as his field director.

What value do you see in working at the city level in particular?

Especially with the current national climate, people don’t understand that city government is what’s impacting our lives every moment—how we get around, what we see around us, our access to housing, all of that. Building strong communities is at the city level. And I just love that, I really enjoy the intimacy of city government.

When community folks and policymakers have conversations and make strategic plays together, you have stronger policy. That’s one of the things that I love. “What’s going on on the ground?” “What do y’all think?” “What is missing here?” “What are you not hearing?” “What do you want to see?” “I think that might work.” “I think this is the pushback we’re going to get.” “Maybe we should do this.”

It’s good to feel like our office is an open space where you can count on us to have that dialogue, rather than us saying, “This is the way it is because we’re in government and we know best.”

What work are you most proud of?

I have a lot of things I’m proud of, but one of my favorites is the very first policy matter I worked with Ayanna on, right after she was sworn in in 2010. There had been this uptick in teen pregnancy, and she was talking about doing something about it, and I told her that’s what I did all of my public health research on in school.

Rather than government being this big entity working from the top down, we over the years have developed this model of cooperative governing. So for this, I just called anyone I could think of who might care about teen pregnancy. We held a hearing at 3 p.m. at City Hall, and we had about 100 people in the chamber, which is pretty rare for that topic and time of day.

From there, we learned that the Boston Public Schools did not have a comprehensive sex education policy, they did not have condom availability, and they had a decades-old policy for pregnant and parenting youth that most officials didn’t even know existed. We established this strategy group of diverse stakeholders, and of organizations that serve pregnant and parenting youth, and spent many hours together strategizing and pushing the city to adopt a policy. Three years in, they finally did, and we now have a comprehensive sex education and condom availability policy. And four years in, we got an updated pregnant and parenting youth policy, and that’s gone really, really well.

What other issues are on your mind?

We’ve been percolating a lot lately around the idea of zoning for healthy communities. At the city level, zoning is where all the action is, but it tends to be focused really on bricks and mortar. How tall are the buildings? How close are they? Are there parking spaces? Those are important considerations, but let’s start looking at displacement as a public health issue. Can we fine tune our zoning to prevent displacement? Can we “improve” neighborhoods and keep people in them at the same time? How do we foster social connectedness through our zoning code policy?

We’ve been doing some focus groups with families. We’ve had a great group of public health practicum students from SPH and Harvard, and from the UMass Boston Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy, helping us strategically think about and engage community stakeholders on this as the mayor is working to revamp the zoning code.

Do you get frustrated with how slowly these changes sometimes come about?

A lot of people have this negative idea about government being incremental, like “incremental” is a bad word. I felt that way even a few years ago, but recently, through some of my own personal practices with yoga and meditation, I’ve really been reflecting on this idea that government is incremental because humans are incremental. When you think about any individual change you want to make for yourself, it takes a lot, whether it’s stopping your daily coffee or getting to the gym. That process takes a long time, and we can go back and forth. You have to say, “This matters and we’re going to be in it for the long haul.”

I think a lot of people have a lot of negative beliefs about government, and some of them are based on personal, real experiences, and that’s OK, but remember that government is run by fellow human beings. The people who call us and the people we know, their voices rise up. Sometimes it’s hard to reach the elected official, but—this isn’t a shameless plug!—their aides do a lot of really incredible work and they work their butts off and they know a lot. They’re the ones who advise the elected officials, so get to know the aides of your elected officials as well.

Any advice for our recent graduates, your new fellow alumni?

Honestly, I think the most important advice—and it’s hard for all of us to receive it—is take care of yourself. Especially when we’re about to embark on a new adventure, and with everything going on in the world, we want to give our all, but it’s really important that our activism is sustainable, and it’s only sustainable if we take care of ourselves.

Now more than ever we need healthy, full, vibrant people to advance some really important work, especially in the public health field.

—Michelle Samuels