3 Ways to Invest in Community
These are the full remarks given Sunday, February 27.
For those of you who don’t know, Efrat is the future Bloomington Township Trustee. She has been an invaluable partner for those of us on the Monroe County Council at the United Way whether working on issues of shelter, food insecurity, childcare and more. Her campaign deserves your support!
My name is Peter Iversen, and I am running for the Monroe County Council First District because I believe in Investing In Our Community. The Monroe County Council is the fiscal body, and investments from this body can make effective changes that HEALS, PROTECTS, and UPLIFTS all residents.
I talk about Community because I saw it growing up in a union household.
My father’s job was a machinist in a factory. It was a great job that gave him pride and purpose. This was a time and place when a person with only a high school education, such as he, could succeed. And he did for a time. With that Union job my parents were able to buy a home in a quaint neighborhood next a park and across the street from an elementary school with amazing sledding hills. This job not only secured a middle class lifestyle, but it also allowed my parents to send three kids to college. This story concludes with the factory moving out of country, and the hundreds of loyal workers were left to find jobs that couldn’t possibly match the union wages they had earned.
This is why economic resilience is so important to me. We build community by supporting workers.
I also saw a community of educators with my mother who is an elementary school teacher. Teachers bonded together to ensure they were reaching their students. They made sure that the students not only learned, but were fed and loved. In the county council we took a stand to make sure girls are educated in STEM. This is important to me because in Indiana a woman makes on average 72 cents for every dollar a man makes for the same work. As I look at the daughters here today, that feel an deep diasapointment in our society. Every step we can take to ensure we eliminate the wage gap at the local level is a good one.
And these are the reasons why this campaign is important. With your support, we will face and defeat one of the only contested races in the general election this fall, and we will do so by focusing on three shared values:
First, investing in Diversity, investing in equity, and investing in inclusion heals our community.
Our Community is at an inflection point. We can choose to embrace our multicultural democracy, borne out by the 2020 Census showing decreases in the white population and double digit increases in Black, Asian, and Hispanic populations. We can believe that we derive strength not only in differences of race and ethnicity, but also gender, sexuality, ability, language, and religion.
Or there is another choice. We can choose to be a society where we shrink back to a history of discrimination, fear, and hatred.
I urge us to choose the former!
In fact, The Monroe county council can continue to do the work of dismantling structural racism by contracting with Black-owned businesses, supporting research like that being done with the Prosecutor's office with IU scholar Eric Gromman, and working to bolster PreTrial diversion and crisis services. Most importantly, I need to do the work. In this way, leadership can be sincere and it can come from a place of abundance.
Second, combating the climate crisis protects our community
We have a choice. We can either invest in evidence-based practices proven in other communities to say that the Anthropocene is here and that we are already experiencing a climate crisis.
Or we can become distracted, and tinker in the margins without any data or measurable outcomes. I think our choice is clear.
That is why it is my goal to:
Hire Monroe County’s inaugural sustainability Director to maintain a focus in this critical area.
Conduct Monroe County‘s inaugural community wide greenhouse gas inventory, collecting vital data.
Write and implement Monroe County‘s inaugural climate action plan which will build on the Resikiency Report and the GHG inventory to set measurable outcomes that can be made in conjunction with private and public entities.
Third, we must Invest in public health to uplift the entire public, because these past two years have pushed us to the brink.
Let us pause here, to remember the 878 Monroe County neighbors, who perished during this time due to COVID-19…These have been hard times, but I am confident that we will emerging stronger.
Therefore, when elected, you can look forward to the continued investing in stores of naloxone so that first responders and the trained public can administer this life-saving drug. This includes the installation of the Naloxboxes throughout the community; you will also see
ARPA funds invested to ensure that childcare is affordable and accessible to every single resident of Monroe County who needs it, in partnership with the Community Foundation
ARPA funds will also expand transportation in partnership with Area 10 Agency of Aging to reduce barriers for our elderly residents who simply want to access medical care.
We will continue to invest in combating racism which is a Public Health Crisis
We will invest in evidence-based criminal justice reform, working closely alongside the judicial branch of Monroe County to move increasingly toward restorative justice and acknowledging the role trauma plays in mental health.
We will invest in sexual health, to educate, treat, and prevent infection in our community
We will invest in harm reduction and defend the evidence based practice of syringe exchange services.
We will invest in affordable housing not only for those neighbors experiencing houselessness through partnership with the United Way and the Heading Home Plan, but also to ensure that those looking for a home will not be priced out of Monroe County markets. We need to increase the affordable housing stock.
Allow me to conclude by inviting you to visit Peter iversen.org. There you can join dozens of others by making a recurring donation to the campaign. You can read more about the issues I discussed, and find ways to communicate with the campaign.
If you agree with me that Investments in Community will HEAL, PROTECT, and UPLIFT, then please sign up to volunteer with the campaign and click the QR code to make a gift.
I’m Peter Iversen and I’m running to invest in our community!
