People Powered: Interviewing Activist, Progressive, and Candidate for Congress Ashmi Sheth
Ashmi Sheth is a first-generation Asian American running for Congress in New York City’s tenth congressional district. As a climate and education activist, Ashmi has had a long career advocating for the rights of minorities and working class citizens from serving on the executive board in the League of Women Voters to regulating big banks at the Federal Reserve. Now, she is working to bring a progressive platform to NY-10 with equal opportunity policies like universal healthcare, free public college, and a green new deal.
In this piece, Ashmi joins me as we discuss the stakes of running for Congress as a first-generation American, the importance of representation in politics, and just how exactly a twenty-first century government should operate.
What’s your background as a first-generation Asian American and what was it like growing up?
My parents are from India and I grew up in affordable housing. Growing up, we financially had little. My parents started with less than twenty five dollars so we were focused on survival. It was very difficult and we relied on our community. Our neighbors were immigrants from China, Korea, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Mexico and would provide us with after school care. My brother and I had the chance to see how many different people in our diaspora lived.
How did you become interested in public policy and politics?
My family is public service driven and my interest in public policy started off very young. At first, it was mainly focused on our rights in the immigrant community. For Indian Americans, we don't see much mainstream representation about our heritage or culture. Our culture often has been appropriated (like the words karma, yoga, or namaste) thus it raises the question of: how do we start building an identity in politics? It then stemmed into “How do we get equal access to high quality scholarships?” We are placed with such high expectations in the education system and often have to address the full cost of education.
In our district, 1 in 5 people are Asian American but we don’t really have a voice. Especially as a first-generation American, we’re so focused on building financial stability that we forget to harness our political power. Beyond my identity as an Asian American, I also have a disability and I’m a woman so it’s about having like-minded people in office who are acknowledging our rights. To do that, we have to mobilize our community, we have to canvass, and we have to help people understand their rights. Change is incremental so you may start extremely small but from there, it just builds.
I was watching one of your interviews, and you mention that you’ve been planning this run for over a decade now. Was there a particular moment that inspired you to run for Congress?
Leadership starts in so many ways, as a community organizer, as a student leader, the books we read, and the environment we grow up in are examples of some of the factors. From high school internships for minorities in public service to serving as the Indian Students Association president for nearly 800 students, these opportunities then grew into state and federal level public service. As I began directly accessing our elected officials, I quickly found our perspective is never really there at the table. It’s essential for us to change that.
We had AOC’s former field director as an advisor and Cori Bush’s former campaign manager on our team now. We have Amy Vilela who is an incredible progressive. We brought on hundreds of millennials and Gen-Z through this process to knock on doors and write policy with us. Thousands of people believe in this work and it’s important because we’re running on a platform that’s much broader and more inclusive. All the policies on our website are written by people on the ground which is amazing and stuff that campaigns otherwise don’t highlight. What are our people talking about around the country? What are the issues we should be thinking about in terms of legislation today? It looks very different from the rhetoric we hear in the mainstream media.
I love your idea of this community built platform. On your campaign website you have a list of policies that are created and submitted by community members themselves. Can you explain a little more about what community based policy-making entails and how do you collect all these policy suggestions?
We reach out to the community members. We go to them, and we don’t wait for them to come to us. If you look at a traditional representative, they’re basically saying “Please fill out this questionnaire on my website and we’ll come back to you.” In reality, what we should be doing is creating spaces where community members can represent themselves more effectively. So somebody who cares about having affordable food should have access to conveying their needs in public policy.
Our process is that we schedule so many meetings with people whether they’re advocates, millennials, Gen-Z, or minorities. We ask them “What are issues that you care about and need attention in politics? How do we make sure that we can represent your interests and ideas?”
There’s also a lot of people like my parents where English isn’t their first language so another one of our major focuses is being able to communicate more effectively with them by doing language translations.
What appears to be the most pressing concerns for the residents of District 10?
It’s definitely about building a twenty-first century government. Our community is fatigued and frustrated with how officials handled COVID, but worried that we don’t have representatives proactively addressing the needs of tomorrow. For us, that means investing in small businesses, public education, safety, and climate resiliency. It means transparency on how our tax dollars are spent. These are the issues people care about.
What are the challenges of running as a progressive and an immigrant in a district that’s been controlled by the incumbent for so many years?
We’ve seen significant support, but the challenges are real. Politics as usual and a system that favors incumbents, exploits and abuses regular people who run for office - which is why we don’t see a lot of working class minorities in this space. Today, I’ve spoken with 400 people so far and I’ve sent out 300 emails and this is just the norm. To be able to do this, I had to quit my job and give up my health insurance. I haven’t been paid a single cent in months. Not only do you not have the money to survive but you also don’t have support from the Democratic establishment. That’s why this conversation needs to happen. When more people understand how rare it is for people like us to be running and participating in this process, the more people will value the work of grassroots organizers.
Even with all these challenges, I noticed on your Instagram that you were able to raise nearly as much funding as the incumbent just from small donors alone which is really impressive.
Yes, the truth is the Democratic party offers no support and they also require super steep fees in order to just run under the party. Incumbents are also required to pay fees and the problem with that is when officials are so focused on raising money everyday, they just become glorified telemarketers. That’s not what our system is supposed to look like and we have to support new leaders. We need to get money out of politics!
If we don’t elect younger leaders now, we’re going to have to pay the price. It's scary because we’re the generation affected by the massive debt burden and climate change. How are we ever going to have ownership? We don't even expect to have social security. It’s giving people the reality check that it’s only getting worse the older we get unless we start being on the offensive and tackling these problems.
For us to even have all this support from people and progressives saying “I stand by you” is huge. We have people from the squad who have worked in leadership and have the capacity to manage these successful progressive campaigns in my team now. It just shows that we’re strong in the work we’re doing and people across the country believe in it.
I noticed that you do a lot of organizing and activism work. Do you have any organizations or groups that you think are making an impact that you would recommend people to support?
I used to be on the board of the executive board of the League of Women Voters and I highly recommend them. Our campaign also works with so many other movements happening around the city. We’re currently working with the Unified Black Caucus and Black Lives Matter to address issues like gentrification. As soon as you start working with the campaign, you build deeper relationships with advocacy organizations and government institutions.
What’s the biggest way right now to support your campaign?
Right now, what we need are volunteers on the ground. I will ask that if there’s anybody who can volunteer through our website, even if it’s for an hour a week, it’s really what we need. A lot of the work is helping us with our email since we receive hundreds of emails per day and outreach like door knocking or collecting commitments from people.
Helping on a campaign is a transformative process where you learn more about yourself, build thick skin, and connect with others in a more human way. The work is extremely meaningful and we registered people who have not had access or been able to exercise their voting rights. A large group of people in our constituency are not registered to vote and that’s the biggest gap in the democratic process.
We also have so many different fields for volunteers in our campaign. A lot of Asian Americans don’t know about the jobs in this space. We have fields in communications, fundraising work, social media, digital strategy, and data science. Politics can be a great avenue to not only make a stable income but also make a substantial difference in people’s lives. There’s an entire industry out there that we have to start claiming because we have the skill set to be successful in it.
For more information about Ashmi for Congress, the community built platform, and to keep up with her campaign, check out the links below!
Platform: https://ashmiforcongress.com/community-built-policies
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ashmisheth/?hl=en
If you’re interested in supporting Ashmi’s campaign, please donate or volunteer here! The election is in four months – let’s go!
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