Playing the Long Game: A Conversation on Policy, Power, and Justice with Alum Alyssa Benalfew-Ramos.
Photo courtesy of Alyssa Benalfew-Ramos.
Playing the Long Game: A Conversation on Policy, Power, and Justice with Alum Alyssa Benalfew-Ramos
As the chief of policy for the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts, Alyssa Benalfew-Ramos (SPH’19) aims to build the political power of the state’s Black community to advance racial and economic justice.
Public health professionals should always have an answer prepared for the question: If you could wave a magic wand and solve one public health problem today, what would it be and why?
Alyssa Benalfew-Ramos (SPH‘19) received this advice from her professors at the School of Public Health while studying health policy and law as an MPH student.
It’s an essential question to consider, she says, “Because you never know when someone’s going to ask you [the question] and hand you the money.”
That is exactly what happened at her first workplace after graduation, Benalfew-Ramos recalls. She was serving as a program manager for the Boston Youth Resilience & Recovery Collaborative at the Boston Public Health Commission when her team received a $1M federal grant from the Office for Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s Opioid Affected Youth initiative. Their directive was relatively open-ended: address substance use in young people. While the team could have chosen an approach from the literature, they opted to use a community-based participatory research model to determine what to do with the money. In collaboration with youth, their caregivers, and community-based organizations, they assembled a task force and steering committee and together devised a strategic, multi-pronged campaign to communicate to young people that it was never too late to reach out for help.
“That taught me that if you really want to do something equitably, you can do it,” says Benalfew-Ramos. It is a lot of work, though, she adds. “A lot of institutions were not structured to deliver equitable outcomes for everyone, and many people were left out—Black people, other people of color, queer people, people with disabilities, older adults, or, in some cases, young people. I’m always trying to do work to serve folks who may otherwise not be served, including in my current roles.”
Today, as the chief of policy for the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts (BECMA), Benalfew-Ramos is building the political power of the state’s Black community to advance racial and economic justice. She also serves as a lead facilitator for GenUnity, a Boston-based nonprofit dedicated to community leadership development, where she guides conversations on housing justice to tackle Boston’s affordable housing crisis. In addition, she is in her third year of teaching the Health Equity (MP786) course to graduate students at the BU School of Social Work.
Benalfew-Ramos was first inspired to pursue a career in public health by her aunt, who was diagnosed with an extremely rare form of cancer when Benalfew-Ramos was young. Benalfew-Ramos’s mother served as her sister’s healthcare proxy and often brought her daughter along when accompanying her sister to her many medical appointments. Healthcare fascinated Benalfew-Ramos, but she was more drawn to social studies and history than math and science in school. She went on to major in philosophy and public policy at UMass Boston, where she found her true niche, she says, in a minor called Science, Medicine, and Society: Past and Present. Earning her MPH at SPH was a natural next step.
“Looking back now as an adult, my aunt was lucky enough to have really good health insurance. She worked at a job that took care of her. She was a part of a union. She was able to access top-tier care from one of the best hospitals in our region, even though she had immigrated to the United States and wasn’t the most well-resourced person,” says Benalfew-Ramos. “Getting my education at BUSPH taught me a lot about power and systems, both power and systems out in the world, but also ones within academia. Seeing those at play prepared me in many ways to step into the world.”
Benalfew-Ramos has since made it her mission to help folks understand that equity is not just a “nice-to-have.”
“It’s something that has to be built in, planned for, and you’re going to have to stand up for it, for it to actually happen,” she says.
In conversation with SPH, Benalfew-Ramos discussed how she stays focused on the “long game,” engaging the power of community to support a policy agenda that uplifts the historically marginalized and underserved.
Q&A
With Alyssa Benalfew-Ramos (SPH’19)
SPH: In your role as chief of policy at the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts (BECMA), you lead many state-wide policy advocacy initiatives. Could you talk about what that looks like?
Benalfew-Ramos: The Black Economic Council of Massachusetts, or BECMA for short, was started in 2015 to try to close the racial wealth gap. Folks saw the Color of Wealth report from the Boston Federal Reserve showing that Black families had a median wealth of $8 in the greater Boston area, and White families had a median wealth of $247,000. BECMA was created to try to address that gap by supporting Black communities and Black businesses. As chief of policy, I do all our government relations. I advise our president and CEO on all things policy and determine our comprehensive public policy and advocacy agenda. We also do some regulatory advocacy, budget advocacy, and legislative advocacy.
I also coordinate with our members. We are a member-based organization, so I help to get them involved in determining what goes on the agenda and participating in opportunities to testify. I testify at the State House and at City Hall. I write public comments. I meet with folks who work for the governor, the lieutenant governor, or other officials. I also invite elected officials, state reps, our federal delegation, the mayor, et cetera, to events that BECMA holds to have them come speak, to have them learn more about our work, and to have them show up and be a part of our community.
SPH: Could you describe an initiative you have worked on that was particularly rewarding or meaningful?
Benalfew-Ramos: My favorite part of the year so far has been designing our public policy agenda because we get to interact with members. We use a racial equity rubric or a policy impact rubric to make determinations around what to support, identifying factors that are most important to us, such as impacts, feasibility, equity, cost, or perceived cost—things of that nature. I hold listening sessions with our members to learn what their priorities are. We also have some existing issue areas that we typically engage around—supporting small and micro businesses, economic mobility and justice-related items, supplier diversity and inclusive procurement, environmental justice and clean energy, and homeownership to build wealth.
I mentioned we support inclusive procurement. Boston has a lot of events coming up in 2026 and beyond: FIFA is coming to Boston, it’s almost Massachusetts’s 250th birthday, and Boston’s 400th birthday is coming up in 2030. We want to ensure that small and micro businesses can get contracts so they don’t miss out on this once-in-a-generation opportunity. So, we went to City Hall and testified. It was really powerful to see the whole middle section of the hearing room filled with our members engaging around this topic, and, even after, emailing to ask how they could do more. Meeting people where they are in terms of their policy acumen and helping them to build it and get involved is something that I really enjoy.
SPH: People often say policy work requires a lot of patience because it can be slow-moving at times. How do you stay motivated and hopeful during that process?
Benalfew-Ramos: I think of it as short and long games. A lot of the bills we support, folks have been in coalition around these bills for as many as 10 years, and they haven’t passed. But are they getting further into the cycle than they got last cycle? What could we do with our social and political capital to advance these bills further than they have gone before or help them to cross the finish line? How do we let those who are leaders lead, and maybe step behind them to back them up when they have an advocacy day or a lobbying day? For me, it’s seeing that there are different kinds of work we can do, engaging our members and community. Getting folks involved, to me, that’s a win. Having folks show up to testify or being able to say that for every hearing that was related to one of our bills, I met with legislators. I told them about our position. They were engaged. I built new relationships. I think it’s about having a more comprehensive view of all the different elements that make up a successful policy and advocacy shop—and not just looking at whether a bill passed.
There is also the [state] budget. How do we get wins in the budget each year—wins for ourselves as an organization, but also wins for causes we really care about? There is a program called STASH, Saving Towards Affordable Sustainable Homeownership. It’s a first-generation home buyer program, so if your parents didn’t own a home, this is a match savings program to help people buy their first home in a gateway city here in Massachusetts. It’s run through MAHA, which is a housing advocacy organization. They have a successful program, and they are trying to expand it. It’s a no-brainer; it helps people buy their first home; it’s benefited mostly people of color; it’s in gateway cities, which are economic hubs; it has supported people who are single heads of households; and they have results. They have their own amazing policy shop of their own, but others and I joined in to support them, and now, they just got $200,000 in the state budget for this program. For me, that’s a humongous victory. Even though I don’t run the program, I know that ultimately, Massachusetts families are going to benefit, and that helps me sleep.
SPH: What advice would you give to students who are interested in making a difference in their community, like what you are doing, but are unsure where to start?
Benalfew-Ramos: The advice I typically give students is that they should—whatever they’re passionate about—learn as much as they possibly can about that subject and be forever students. My policy professors at BUSPH would say, “Wake up and read Kaiser every morning.” They’d ask us, “Where are you getting your news and current events?” and “Are you reading the articles that are coming out about the topic that you’re interested in?” So, I always share that advice with students: be well-read, well-versed.
We’re living in a really challenging moment related to our rights, democracy, the aftermath or continuing of COVID, and the resurgence of diseases that we thought we had a handle on before. I think that we all must not abandon the work that we know is important. It might be easier not to do this type of work right now or pivot entirely, and obviously, I want folks to be able to take care of themselves, but I do think it’s important that we don’t abandon public health because, whether or not people realize it, they’re going to need us.
