My name is Molly Coleman, and I’m running to be our next Saint Paul City Council Member in Ward Four.

I love this community. When my great-grandmother immigrated from Ireland, she made her home on Lafond and Griggs. When my grandparents moved from Minneapolis, they moved into Episcopal Homes on University and Fairview. And when my husband and I were buying our first home and deciding where to build our family, we knew that if we wanted to be near the Green Line, in a walkable, bike-able, thriving community, there was no place better than Hamline-Midway. We are now raising our son in this community. We walk to ECFE at the SPPS Early Childhood Hub at Galtier; bike to and from daycare drop-off on our city bike paths; order takeout from Master Noodle and Sole Cafe probably more than we should; and spend our weekends at the coffee shops and breweries and parks throughout this community.

I was born in Frogtown and grew up on the West Side. I’m a proud graduate of Saint Paul Public Schools—I learned Spanish at Adams Spanish Immersion, and learned what it meant to be a passionate, engaged member of our community at Central High School. As a high schooler, I interned for Al Franken’s 2008 campaign, served on the board of the Minnesota Young DFL, worked as a youth outreach coordinator for the state party, and was president of the Central High School Democrats. I crossed over to the University of Wisconsin for college, but came back to intern at Women Winning and for Senator Klobuchar’s DC and Minneapolis offices.

I began my full-time career working in education. I knew what an excellent education I had been lucky enough to receive in SPPS, but I also knew that luck had been far more important for me than it should have been. I knew that my classmates at Central hadn’t all walked out of graduation with every tool they needed to succeed—because as good as the teachers in that building were, they were being forced to do too much with too little. So, both during a gap year before college and for several years after college, I worked for a nonprofit called City Year New York, as an AmeriCorps member and then on staff. City Year takes young people and puts them in schools, in my case in the Bronx and Harlem, not to replace teachers, but to provide student support and wraparound services in partnership with their classroom teachers—before-school programming, after-school programming, 1:1 tutoring, and more.

I loved that work, but I felt like we were constantly trying to solve a problem downstream. We had massive levels of social inequality resulting from centuries of intentional disinvestment in communities of color, low-income communities, and immigrant communities, and at City Year we were trying to solve for all of that with, quite literally, some glue sticks and construction paper. It was good and important work, but it didn’t feel like it was enough to bring about the fundamental change that we need.

So, I decided to go to law school. I enrolled at Harvard Law because I wanted to gain a set of tools that would enable me to better fight for systemic justice. What I found, however, was that the legal system—and, too often, the legal profession—was not designed to be a tool to fight against systemic injustice, but was in many instances the source of that injustice. For decades, the law has been rigged in service of powerful interests, putting corporations over people and the interests of the few over the interests of the many, and as a result we have a society in which working people cannot get ahead.

After spending a few months of law school complaining about this, I decided to do something about it. In 2018, I co-founded the People’s Parity Project, a national nonprofit that I’ve been running for the last seven years. PPP organizes lawyers and law students to reform democracy and build a legal system that actually works for working people. In my role as Executive Director, I’ve been fighting for everything from an end to the tiny provisions in workers’ contracts that strip them of their right to hold their employers accountable for breaking the law, up through transforming the role that unelected, unaccountable Supreme Court justices play in our democracy.

As I’ve done this work, it’s become clear that, if we want to truly build an economy—and a democracy—that works for working people, that has to happen at the local level. I’m running to serve Ward Four because I believe that we have an obligation to do the hard work of building a more just, more equitable, more inclusive community here in Saint Paul in order to restore faith in the idea that it is possible to collectively build a better world. I love our community, and I look forward to working with all of our neighbors to build a city where all people can thrive.