Who is Jacqui?

My parents always taught me the importance of fighting for social justice from a very young age. My mother is a New York City school Teacher taught me the importance of hard work, labor, and the impact of worker’s unions on securing us all the most basic worker's rights. She is a breast cancer survivor who never stopped fighting for my future, and the futures of all of her students. My father worked for the United Nations, working for human rights across the globe. They taught me to never give up and always do the most good.

Growing up on the waterfront, environmental policy has been central to my political development, and informs the core of my political identity. In 2007 I was one of the student co-founders of the Green Schools Alliance, an international coalition of students focused on global action against climate change. From there I attended school at the University of Colorado at Boulder, concentrating on  Environmental Design on a leadership scholarship. At the same time, our city was visited by disaster for the second time in my life when Hurricane Sandy made landfall, inundating my home and displacing hundreds of people I knew as neighbors-- including my mother. The urgency of what I was doing became clear: after graduating, I couldn’t wait to come home and help rebuild my city and my community, and to help affect positive change for our future.

For the past four years I have continued to serve my community as an organizer, working to expand access to healthcare for the most at risk individuals in Brooklyn. When COVID-19 arrived in New York, I reached out to my friends and allies at the RAICES Red Hook Senior Center in order to create Red Hook’s mutual aid group, Red Hook Relief. Red Hook Relief has since given out thousands of meals weekly, responded to neighborhood crisis, and advocated for all neighbors.

Why I Decided to Run

After running for City Council in 2021, I knew the work couldn’t stop. I came to the conclusion to run for State Committee Member when I saw that the recent November ballot propositions put in place to expand our democracy and voting rights had failed to pass. This is a huge failing of our democratic party leadership. This is nothing new to voters across the city. Every year we see more an more issues with our poll worker system, democratic participation, and absolutely zero transparency.

The Brooklyn Democratic Party continues to not inform voters of important dates and meetings, and consists of back-door deals with those at the top. It’s time to stop the massive inequality of power with those few in the top in control of most of the decisions about our communities- and take back the Party for the people who vote for it. It’s time for a an inclusive democratic party that gets back to fighting for true democracy in our borough, transparency and more participation.