What are the top three priorities for social change that you’d like to see tackled by legislatures across this country?
The first thing I would advocate is to make sure we have some sort of remedies in place to strengthen the enforcement mechanisms, where people are discriminated against because of their past mistakes. Also, make sure there’s more vehicles to help people overcome these legal hurdles to being barred from an opportunity to get housing and opportunities to get employment.
The second thing is we’re talking about health care issues and pandemics, but our community has been dealing with poor health for for generations. We have bad food, we don’t have good food options. Increasing the pipeline and the access to fresh healthy food. That means investing in urban farming.
The third major thing is housing and utilities. All [of] that’s just too expensive. If you go to places like Raleigh, North Carolina, and there [are] small towns, [where] there [are] people who literally haven’t had lights for years because it’s too expensive, there has to be some real controls on what those costs are for rent and utilities.
