Maya Wiley
Mayor - New York City
Maya Wiley has spent her entire life fighting for our communities and against structural racism. She started her education in an underfunded and segregated public school and went on to graduate from Dartmouth College and Columbia Law School. After law school, she became a civil rights lawyer for the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where she fought to save neonatal care, and a maternity ward in Harlem. Wanting to give back more, Maya founded a nonprofit and spent the next dozen years fighting to end structural racism as a working mom. In the five years since she resigned from the de Blasio administration, she has taught at The New School and, as the volunteer chair of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, she has held NYPD officers accountable.
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We all love New York City — the energy, the people, the diversity, the nightlife, the culture. So why does it have to be so hard to get by and raise a family here? If this is truly going to be the greatest city on earth, then it’s also got to be the greatest place to live. That means a city where every single person can afford decent housing, and our young people know they can afford to stay and build a life here. Where people feel safe walking down the street or riding the subway — and Black and brown folks know that the police are going to treat us fairly if we ever need them. Where we finally solve the homelessness crisis, not just with housing but with mental health services for people who need them. I know how to get this stuff done because I am a civil rights lawyer and a mom, and I won’t stand by while we risk losing a generation of our kids to the trauma of injustice and violence when we should be investing in their futures.
We’ll recover from this crisis; New York always recovers. But in the past, we haven’t recovered for all of us. Right now, with the right leadership, we have a chance to not just come back from this crisis but actually fix what’s broken, and rebuild as a stronger, more equitable city and a better place to live. I am running for mayor to make sure that we don’t just hand the keys over to Wall Street or Big Tech, but build a recovery that lifts up all of our communities.