Lorie Honor
Borough President - Staten Island
Lorie shares her life with her husband Robert and is a mother to sons, Jack Henry and Kavanagh… and also Pink, the Great Dane. Lorie grew up in New Dorp, with family roots in both Mariners Harbor and Tottenville. She attended Notre Dame Academy High School, earned a Bachelor’s in Communicative Disorders from SUNY Buffalo, and a Masters of Education from College of Staten Island.
Lorie’s mother, Marie DelPriore, former Office Manager at Sullivan and Cromwell, immigrated to Staten Island from Foggia, Italy as a child and her father, Ron Bollmeyer, former Captain at FDNY, has Staten Island roots going back to the days of the thriving oyster beds in Raritan Bay, in which her ancestors made their living.
Lorie has taken on the loving repair and renovation of one of the oldest homes in Staten Island, where she lives in Stapleton.
Since 2016 Lorie has been a leader and community organizer, co-founding the largest and most engaged women’s organization on Staten Island, Staten Island Women who March, in 2017. She has worked alongside grassroots organizations in Brooklyn and Staten Island on mission-driven activism around the ACA, DACA, Planned Parenthood, gun control, anti-Muslim ban, LGBTQ, gender equality, and more.
In 2018, Lorie served as the Director of Community Outreach, playing an integral role on the winning team that elected Max Rose for Congress. In 2019, Lorie served as Outreach Coordinator for Virginia Ratify ERA, helping elect equality-supporting candidates that created a Democratic majority to VA State House leading Virginia to become the 38th and final state needed to ratify the ERA. “One of the proudest days of my life was in February of 2020, sitting in the gallery in the House of Representatives, watching Congressman Rose vote on equality legislation, knowing that I, a daughter of Staten Island, had contributed to ratifying the Constitution to ensure equal rights for all Americans.”
Lorie served as the Chief of Staff for Vote Equality US, a national equality organization in the ERA movement where she implemented all manner of outreach and GOTV operations leading up to November 2020 Senate elections in Georgia, Iowa, and Montana. In preparation for the run-off elections in Georgia in January of 2021, Vote Equality was one of the countless grassroots, civic, and faith communities that contributed to Senators Ossoff and Warnock being elected. This new Senate majority sets up the ERA for ratification this year.
Throughout her 25 years as an educator, Lorie was acknowledged by the UFT and by private grantors as being an exceptional teacher. She is calm, compassionate, personable, and persuasive.
The best teachers teach with passion and intellectual curiosity. They also know who they are teaching and how best to reach them through authentic engagement. This begins by creating an environment of empathy and trust from the start.
Lorie knows how her consummate professional colleagues are managing to teach throughout the pandemic, adapting to protocols and technology to take care of their students. Teachers are simply problem-solving from the moment they get out of bed! As a parent, Lorie is empathetic to parents who are now teaching and learning alongside their children. As a community member, she knows the economic and personal stress that is weighing on so many families, especially women and people of color, who have been hit the hardest by Covid and the worst job market since the Great Depression.
As Borough President, Lorie knows she has to reach across the Island to meet people and listen and learn. She knows they won’t always agree, but she will always be agreeable.
Lorie opened Honor Wines on Bay Street just days after the devastation of Super Storm Sandy. In 2018, Honor Wines had to shutter and relocate to Stapleton when the original location in St. George was sold to developers. Less than a year later, Covid-19 caused them to recalibrate again, so she knows firsthand how small business owners are feeling due to the Covid-19 pandemic— an era where small businesses and restaurants are shamefully left adrift and unsupported.
Lorie understands both the challenges of owning a small business and of the callous disregard of government agencies toward them.
As Borough President, she will be an advocate for small businesses. She will create a task force within Borough Hall to work with struggling businesses, and be a watchdog for unfair practices that hurt Main Street business.