Nithya for the City
I was recently at a Zoom retreat for an LA-based advocacy nonprofit. There, during one of the sessions, we were asked to name one of the highlights of our 2020.
The most popular answer from the group was “Nithya.”
Being a staffer on the Nithya campaign was an incredible experience, and one that I feel extremely proud to have been a part of.
I joined Nithya’s campaign in 2019. I had met Nithya through the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition: an organization that she founded and that I continue to serve as Policy Chair. When I discovered that Nithya was running for Council District 4—a region that covered much of SELAH’s territory—I was ecstatic.
Over the course of my year-and-some-change, I helped the campaign in a number of different ways. Primarily this involved policy development and digital strategy.
Through my policy work, I focused on the campaign’s largest platforms: “Transforming Public Safety” (co-author) and “Creating Affordable Housing” (author).
Leading the discussions, research, and development of these platforms represents some of my proudest work. Both of these policy documents were developed collaboratively with stakeholders and experts, and cover a wide ranging list of topics and proposals.
The first, “Transforming Public Safety”, was created in the wake of the George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests over the summer, and aimed to provide an overview and possible road map for LA’s policy response to policing and public safety. To do so, our team delved into research around policing methods, analyzed city budgeting, studied reports on various aspects of public safety—including mental health, food security, and more—and examined related municipal, federal, and international efforts.
The second, “Creating Affordable Housing” set out to achieve two straightforward yet complex goals:
1: Explain how Affordable housing is currently built in the city, and 2: identify ways our City Council could create a transformative amount of it. To do so, I led a team of housing experts—from developers and urban planners to municipal and county financiers. The resulting document analyzes the byzantine process involved in local affordable housing development, and proposes several opportunities to expand and protect our current portfolio of covenanted, naturally occurring, and permanent supportive affordable housing.