Today Jasmin Sanchez – a community organizer, climate justice advocate, and housing activist – launched her campaign to represent New York’s 65th District in the NY State Assembly. Sanchez is growing a movement in her community for progressive policies that would protect small businesses with a public banking option and commercial rent control, safeguard housing as a human right for all by establishing community land trusts and passing Good Cause Eviction, nurture our educational systems by ensuring universal broadband access and modifying mayoral control to give the community more power, and fighting for our environment with a Green New Deal for Lower Manhattan.
Sanchez enters the race with a long history of progressive organizing in her native Lower East Side, and throughout the city. A lifelong NYCHA resident, Sanchez has led dozens of training seminars to educate residents on tenants rights as housing conditions deteriorated through institutional neglect, has represented Public Housing tenants in State Assembly hearings, and was part of the team that drafted federal legislation for a Green New Deal for Public Housing. Her housing justice advocacy has also included helping Section 8 residents get critical repairs from landlords to have a dignified home. Sanchez worked as a case manager with Henry Street Settlement and as a program director at Grand Street Settlement to develop after-school programs that offered college prep, leadership development, and summer youth employment opportunities.
More recently, Sanchez founded Lower East Side Mutual Aid, a network of community organizations and volunteers that provided 14,000 meals to over 5,000 residents of Chinatown, Two Bridges, the Lower East Side, and the East Village at the onset of the pandemic. At the same time, Sanchez helped lead the development of food distribution systems on Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2020 campaign, working alongside other organizers on the Congresswoman’s team to distribute food, masks, and nurture mutual aid network development in The Bronx and Queens.
“Until recently, politics has operated from a place of exclusion. People like us are not supposed to run for office – people from the working poor community, living paycheck to paycheck. But our district was built on the strength of immigrants and working class people coming together to fight for a just society. That work is not yet done,” Sanchez said in a statement. “We must now come together against the forces that prioritize profit over people - that push out families that have built this city from the ground up, so that a few wealthy investors can get a hefty tax break from yet another luxury high-rise. We have watched East River Park and so many community landmarks be sacrificed in the name of ‘urban renewal’ - the same ‘urban renewal’ that has turned a blind eye to the rise in violence against our Asian neighbors. I want every resident of Lower Manhattan to know that when I go to Albany, they are coming with me – and we will build our future in AD-65 together.”
Learn more about Jasmin and what she is fighting for by following her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, where event updates, volunteer opportunities, and more information will be shared by her campaign.
The 65th district is currently represented by Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, who will be stepping down after recently announcing her campaign bid for State Senate in the Democratic primary election on June 28.
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