Álvarez-Rodríguez, Nilka – Candidate for Mayor

Posted on 07. Aug, 2009 by ywwlawrence in About Your Candidates

Nilka is a democrat, whose political definition and career was the result of her quests to understand the nature of her father’s suicide in 1969. Her understanding was fed by her formal education and 30 years (NYS 19 years & MA 11 years) of human service work and community activism. She found that while the rest of the country was doing fine, NYC faced a recession. Politicians and entrepreneurs allowed manufacturing to leave to transform NYC into the financial capital of the world. Fathers unable to find employment committed suicide or turned to substance abuse, domestic violence, and crime. Mothers were left to rebuild and to become the anchors of their communities. Said discovery gave Nilka the real meaning of the saying “the personal is political.”

Nilka specifically found that up to the late 70s single female headed households were the trend. Racially and ethnically diverse mothers rebuilt communities challenged by social decline, arson sprees, and disinvestment. She joined Jimmy Carter’s cousin, Jan Peterson, at the National Congress of Neighborhood Women. She became an advocate for welfare and educational reform, jobs, and housing. She was also active in several groups such as NYS Governor Cuomo’s Executive Office of the Women’s Division; Job for Justice; Church Women United; Latina Women’s Caucus; Political Women’s Caucus; Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies /Feminization of Poverty; Parents United to Save Our Children; NYC Latinos Voting Rights Committee; Brooklyn Borough President Howard Golden’s Hispanic Advisory Committee; Rainbow Coalition; United Nations/Indigenous Women Committee; NYS Assembly Urban Health Committee; and Mujer Inc.

Nilka carried her tradition of being involved and encouraging others to do the same in Lawrence. She did so through several avenues: Lawrence City Council, Greater Lawrence Family Health Center; Lawrence/Methuen Community Coalition; Lawrence Weed & Seed Coalition; Commission on the Status of Women; Woman’s Agenda; North Broadway & Prospect Hill Neighborhood associations; Women Institute on Leadership Development; and EOEEA/Northeast Coalition on Mercury.

Nilka knows from personal experience the real impact that government decisions have on working and professional managerial families. That is why she spent her ten years as a Lawrence City Council and Chairperson of Housing advocating for families and communities. As Mayor, she will work to create good, local jobs in Lawrence, protect our families’ homes, and to ensure that every child in Lawrence gets a quality education. Times are tough and money is short, that makes a commitment to working families all the more important.

Nilka is the most qualified to be our Mayor because she can balance politics with the needs of real people; and, she holds the experience and education to be a strong administrator. She grew from the ranks of direct service worker to administrative and supervisory management that for five years included overseeing a staff of 100 people. Nilka works full time as a management consultant for the Executive Office of Health & Human Services through the Department of Developmental Services (formerly the Department of Mental Retardation); and, as an adjunct professor at Merrimack College/Women’s Studies Department. Nilka holds a Bachelors degree in Human Services; a Master’s degree in Business and in Policy Studies; and, a Doctorate in Policy Studies.

Government Plan
Citizen Involvement in City Processes
In the ten years serving on the Lawrence City Council Nilka created several opportunities for Lawrence residents to take part in City government: Lawrence teen city council; language interpreters; accessibility for people with disabilities; translation of the City budget into Spanish; and openly sharing information and supporting civic organizations, projects, and actions. Nilka plans as Mayor to use part of her administrative staff to create a constituent service center that will not only assist residents to resolve problems and navigate public services, but also will incorporate a Citizen Task Force to review and advise on the quality of public services and strategies to move the City forward.

Education
Nilka’s life experience also includes the area of education. She functioned as an educational counselor, director of high school drop out prevention programs, and as director of an alternative high school. In these capacities, she learned that quality education for our children creates the foundation for a strong community and a strong economy. Every child in Lawrence needs strong schools with small classes and good teachers. We must fight to make sure our children get the resources they need to succeed. And we must insist that the School Committee be changed to eliminate the Mayor from the role of chairperson and to provide the technical assistance necessary for Committee members to understand the nature of education and to identify the practices most appropriate for Lawrence students and their families.

Affordable post-secondary education for all young adults must also be addressed. Working families are struggling to make ends meet and to support their children’s pursuit of a post-secondary education. Tuition and expenses are even too high at the public colleges and universities. Guidance counselors must move beyond helping the 5 to 10 percent who are going to make it anyway to help the other 90 percent identify scholarship opportunities private and public. We must advocate for the State and Federal governments to develop a fund to support post-secondary education for the children of working and professional managerial families.

Create Unity in the City
Nilka’s experience is that providing opportunities for people to work on common goals is the best way to bring about unity. As part of Nilka’s administration, she plans to be all inclusive and to create opportunities for people to work together regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, age, disability, gender or political affiliation. This effort will take place through three initiatives.

• Enhance communication among department heads and between the Administration and the City Council.
• Build a collaboration of a diverse network of people to create a vision for the City and the plan for making it happen.
• Carefully consider appointments to boards, task forces, and employment based on people’s merits and not political patronage.

Youth
Nilka recognizes gang violence and juvenile delinquency is a critical issue faced by our youth and our families. At the core of these problems are social and economic elements. Families are struggling to make ends meet and to keep their homes. As a consequence many youth are unsupervised at a point in their lives where they are looking to define themselves within an environment of violence and neighborhood decline. Nilka will require a collaborative project incorporating partnership among the Lawrence Police Department with federal and state law enforcement agencies along with Lawrence Public Schools and the Departments of Community Development and Economic Development, as well as social service, faith based, and grassroots organizations. Such a collaborative will be charged with the mandate to create a safe and productive environment for our youth:

• Combine the investigative and prosecutorial practices proven successful to incarcerate violent gang-members and to rehabilitate them through gang intervention programs that will ensure upon their release and return they do not recruit and arm youth to be gang members. This was true after a successful FBI project nationwide in the 90s; but, we should make sure it is not true this time around.
• Enhance the quality of life through neighborhood restoration of vacant lots, abandoned buildings, and decaying parks so that there is no space where criminal activities can be hidden and to improve the quality of life. New housing and development feature elements to accommodate the fact that more than half of the Lawrence’s total population are under the age of 18.
• Implement a public education campaign to address the root cause of gang-involvement through our schools and grassroots organizations so we can offer our youth alternatives to a better future. Indeed, change the recruiters of gang member for recruiters of colleges and of companies with good paying jobs.

Corruption
Nilka will put in place a performance based management system that provides the accountability needed to prevent corruption and to handle corruption swiftly and competently once discovered. Setting goals and objectives to realize a vision for the City and reviewing progress quarterly will keep the Administration, the Council, and the residents of Lawrence in tune to what is being spent and how. Through these progress reviews decisions can be made on whether to continue to put resources toward certain strategies or to change approaches. Given the close monitoring of progress it would be difficult for people to alone make decisions about the use of the people’s or the City’s resources. Monitoring progress will also reveal whether resources are being misused; and, if there were to be misused, it will speed up investigations so that swift action can be taken and the public confidence maintained.

Transparency
Nilka believes a transparent government system is the only way to run a true representative democracy – to truly honor the idea that government exists to care for the welfare and general well being of the residents. She aims to achieve transparency through the following measures:

• Constituent center assisting residents to navigate City services and to become oriented toward government processes.
• Engaging all stakeholders in generating a vision for the City and a plan of action.
• Implementing a performance based management system with clear goals and objectives consistent with the vision, which residents can use to see whether the City is living up to the expectations.
• Creation of a City budget that funds the specific goals and objectives making up the performance management system.

Create Jobs
Nilka knows that Lawrence’s unemployment rate of 17.5% is the highest in the State; and, that, the percentage is higher because people coming out of unemployment benefits without finding a job are not counted in the rate of unemployment. Job creation will be a priority of her administration:

Support funding of state, federal, and private foundations to ensure human and social services agencies can re-hire and hire resident-workers in the service economy. Government budget cuts and sluggish economy has reduced funding for these organizations forced to lay-off a significant number of resident-workers and the devastating impact to the City is the resurfacing of factors known to be associated with urban poverty in the U.S.: violent crime, domestic violence, gang activity, juvenile delinquency, teen pregnancy, substance abuse, poor health status and the like.

Attract new large and mid-size businesses by offering tax and other incentives such as trained workforce for their specific production.

Set up the Community Development Department to stimulate the creation of new small businesses and the expansion of existing small businesses so they can offer employment. And to provide technical assistance on accessing state and federal incentives for hiring residents, as well as assistance with obtaining affordable benefits for their employees.

Charge the Workforce Investment Board and Valley Works Career Center with the responsibility of identifying surfacing new occupations and prepare the workforce to take on these occupations.

Involve the School Department in creating internships for adolescents to offer part-time jobs and opportunities for future long-term employment.

Transition the City’s personnel to a human resources department to work with the human resource departments of incoming and expanding businesses and service organizations to successfully reach out to qualified residents.

Establish linkages with state and federal human resources departments to quarterly set up at City Hall to recruit residents for job vacancies and new projects – especially if in Lawrence and the surrounding municipalities.

Efficient Workforce Environment for City Employees
Nilka continues to advocate that the best avenue for enhancing the efficiency of the City’s workforce is first and foremost to transform the personnel department into a human resources department. This transformation will allow for the following activities:

• Use the performance based management to provide clear guidance on job performance measures and of expectations across department staff.
• Enhance collaboration between the City Council and the Administration to minimize conflict and competing interests from hurting morale.
• Issue citizen service satisfaction surveys to determine areas of strength and areas for improvement and develop corrective action plans that include staff training and development.
• Administer job satisfaction surveys to staff to determine the type of support employees need to function at an optimal level.
• Hold two general staff meeting a year in the evening to keep staff abreast of progress and challenges.

Five-Priority Areas

• Improvement of Government Functions (Budgets, Services, etc.)
• Job Creation & Economic Development
• Public Safety & Neighborhood Restorations
• Quality education for all children
• Youth Development