Jennifer Stewart is a high school teacher at Moses Brown challenging incumbent Jean Phillippe Barros for the House District 59 seat in Pawtucket in the Democratic Primary.

Uprise RI conducted the interview with Stewart over breakfast at Pawtucket’s iconic Modern Diner a few weeks ago. Since then, Stewart has been instrumental in challenging an unconstitutional political lawn sign ordinance, has advocated against a plan to eliminate the only green space in her ward and was instrumental in advocating for Pawtucket native Wendy Carlos, the “godmother” of electronic music, to be inducted into the Pawtucket Hall of Fame. She’s been so busy that Uprise RI delayed publication because we didn’t want to be seen as the Jennifer Stewart news site, but Stewart is hard to avoid for all the right reasons.

Primary day is September 13th. And early voting is happening now.

See also: Pawtucket Rep Barros and challenger Jennifer Stewart tackle the hard questions at GWC

Let me preface this interview by saying that talking with Jennifer Stewart was a pleasure. As I reviewed the recording I was surprised how much I spoke about myself. It was a real conversation that forced me to trim a lot out, because the interview should properly be about the candidate, not the reporter. Which makes the discussion we had before the interview started so ironic:

Jennifer Stewart: You understand as a journalist, and certainly in my work as a teacher, you’re always trying to find a way in – to connect with people.

Uprise RI: What brings me to this work is the idea of meeting people in different contexts, people who have different points of view. To meet people where they are, to learn about the experiences, to the extent that I can. I then try to amplify them through their words, their experiences, their stories, and keep myself out of it as much as possible. I don’t want to filter their words through me. I’m not going to translate, so to speak, what they’re saying. I’m going to quote them accurately.

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Uprise RI: Okay. Let’s do this interview. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself?

Jennifer Stewart: I grew up in Chicago and I lived theres until I was about 30. I initially grew up on the south side of Chicago with my mom and my grandparents and went to a neighborhood Catholic school through eighth grade and then went to the big Jesuit High School. We relocated during my high school years to the north side of Chicago.

I was there for my high school years. Ultimately I was able to get into the University of Chicago, so I went back to the south side to live in Hyde Park. I graduated with a degree in political science and then worked for a couple of years and then went back to school for a PhD program because the plan was to become a professor. I had to do some teaching as part of my graduate program for funding and discovered that I didn’t like working on my dissertation but I liked teaching. Around that time, my spouse Ben was deciding on making a change too. We’ve been together for a long time and had an imprint on each other’s life directions.

So my mother and I helped him to go into the law because of his the activism interests he was developing. In any case, as he was going to make the move to law school, I was like, I don’t know if this PhD thing is going to continue to be my thing. So we moved to Massachusetts. He began law school at Northeastern and I began my first teaching job at a high school in Cambridge. It was a “free to be you and me” kind of independent school. I was there for four years. We ended up moving to Rhode Island, in part because Ben’s from here. And I’ve been here for 16 years.

Uprise RI: What draws you to public service as a state representative? Where does that come from?

Jennifer Stewart: I guess it all goes back to this idea of like, What’s my theory of change? One of the things that motivated me is teaching. I teach history and political science. I teach those things because my theory of change is that if you help young people understand what’s at stake and all the issues, you plant a seed that they can carry as they navigate their adults lives. And hopefully part of that will be working towards a better society,

Uprise RI: A better world for them and their children and on and on.

Jennifer Stewart: Yes. The big interest for me, as a teacher, is democracy. I want healthy democracy in our society, as a real part of people’s lives. Not just elections, but are you empowered to make decisions that help you create the life you want or for the community?

Uprise RI: That seems a difficult thing right now.

Jennifer Stewart: That’s always been the underlying motivation and concern for me. Over the years, from time from time to time, given the kinds of things I teach, I’d have students ask me, “Have you ever run for office? Would you run for office?” and I would just laugh it off. But these last few years have been so troubling and so frustrating I thought maybe I should do it. Maybe what we’re missing is more teachers in the role of representative.

Recently, the year before COVID hit, I lived the five months in Finland. I had received a Fulbright for teachers and it allowed me, with federal money, to be there and do some research on their education system, which is considered by many to be one of the best in the world. It’s a small country and homogenous compared to the us, but I think there’s no excuse for us not to have all the great things that I saw there.

When I got back from that experience, I was looking around and feeling so sad for us. Things have been set up over the years to make it so difficult for ordinary people to get anywhere in their lives. There’s the ideology of individual responsibility that makes people blame themselves for not getting where they wanted to. So when COVID happened I was watching what was going on and getting increasingly more frustrated. All of these things coalesced and I decided to run.

Uprise RI: I have a somewhat similar trajectory in that I went from being a person who read and thought about stuff to somebody who realized it’s all meaningless without taking action. I was probably 48 before I had a inkling of what I was called to do. It’s not obvious.

Jennifer Stewart: It’s basically being open to trying new things, to hearing new things, and then if you hear it enough and you cry enough, you do it.

Uprise RI: There’s hours of time associated with doing what this job. Not only are you going to be at school all day, but then you’re going to go to the State House all night. That can be a little bit trying. Having two jobs, even three jobs, if you think about meeting with constituents and developing ideas and policies. Some reps and senators don’t seem to make that effort to truly represent their constituents. Some of that disconnect is structural but some of it seems beneficial to the status quo.

Jennifer Stewart: One of the things that I found appalling was all the COVID money that the state received – some of that was channeled into the rent relief program – and the difficulty we seemed to have connecting those resources to the people who could use it. I know in our district, for example, there seemed to be very little outreach.

In my life I had an experience as a teenager of a program that existed in Cook County to provide legal representation to families who weren’t getting child support from their fathers. That helped me help my mom make it possible for me to go to college because we were able to use that program to get the child support that was owed to me for, at that point, 16 years. That made huge difference.

Uprise RI: Many state legislators do very little to help their constituents, yet they are almost never challenged in either the primary or the general election.

Jennifer Stewart: That’s part of the problem. It’s hard to know what you don’t know. It’s hard to know that you can ask for things or that you should expect things differently than what you experienced. The last couple of years, looking at what some of the new representatives were doing, led me to think we should have better. We should expect more from our representation.

Uprise RI: As you are going door-to-door, what are you hearing from people? What are the issues that people in your district are most riled up about?

Jennifer Stewart: There’s been a few things that have come up. Education, healthcare and concerns about housing. Also environmental issues. Probably the most frequent issue I hear about has been motivated by what has gone on nationally, for example the abortion decision at the Supreme Court. Guns come up.

Uprise RI: We are in the urban core, right? This part of Pawtucket isn’t rife with crime, per se, but there are gun issues, there are gang issues. When we talk about education in Pawtucket, I know they’re taking some steps towards one unified high school, which some people think might contribute to ending or dampening the gang problem.

Jennifer Stewart: That unified high school is going to take several years. to happen, so the question is, “What are we doing for the schools now? What about the students there now? Are they getting educated in a healthy environment in those buildings? An environment that signifies that they’re cared for and set up to do their best?”

A new high school could be five to ten years away. That’s a lot of classes of students.

Uprise RI: Some of the schools are unhealthy. They have black mold, poor water systems, poor heating, vermin…

Jennifer Stewart: Parts of the ceiling coming down. You can walk by and see the ways in which the grounds aren’t repaired. And all of that stuff is sending signals to students that they are not prioritized.

Uprise RI: You teach at Moses Brown in Providence and that’s a beautiful school and the campus experience there prepares kids for college because it feels like college. They know they are being prioritized.

Jennifer Stewart: You can envision college when you’re there.

One of the things that I would like to see happen is a government that operates to make it so we all don’t have to worry so much. Fundamentally that’s what it’s about for me. And we can do that. It can be done. It was really something to see it in Helsinke, right? In their schools, you didn’t have to worry about so much. The educational system: Do you have to live in this neighborhood to access a good school? No. They are all good schools. You could count on learning things there that weren’t particular to a specific school, they were offered across the board. Public transportation: You don’t have to worry about it so much. You knew the trains and the buses would show up as scheduled. They all had a certain level of comfort and safety. And healthcare: What could potentially happen if you have a health problem in the United States? It’s terrifying.

I don’t think it has to be that way. I know, as someone who has studied and teaches political science. I also know why it is this way. It has to do with institutions, which includes rules and procedures but it’s also about the people that you have in these institutions and their impact on rules and procedures. Those are the two areas that we can change, right? We can change the people who are in these institutions and if we get enough of them in there, they can change the rules and procedures of those institutions. There’s so much power in the ability to define the agenda.

For instance, if you think about the issue of sending bills in committee back for further study, where is this study?

Uprise RI: There is none. Take a bill that’s been heard for like 10 years. When it comes up again they hold it for further study. There’s nothing more to study! Just vote for it, or against it.

Jennifer Stewart: One of the things that I find frustrating is that in a democratic system people are supposed to be able to figure out and articulate their interests and representatives are supposed to convey their interests.

Uprise RI: Ideally.

Jennifer Stewart: But that isn’t happening. Circling back to people having so much to worry about, you can add representation to that list. Because you beg and demand, you try to educate your representative about what’s important about a certain policy… That’s way too much work that people have to do year after years after year and it’s just not right. To me that means you’ve got people in the General Assembly who are not disposed to do the right thing and act on what people are saying. It would be good to know that you have someone representing you who’s on board with your interests.

We can’t afford another ten years just to take half a step forward.

Uprise RI: So when you meet people, what’s your short pitch about why they should vote for you?

Jennifer Stewart: My 30 second pitch is that I’m a teacher. I’ve been working on behalf of young people to help them have the life they envision for themselves. I want to see better for the residents of our district and for the State of Rhode Island. And I want to be a partner in making that happen in the State House and a fight for it. A real ally.