Ayanna Pressley is an advocate, a policy-maker, an activist, and a survivor. On November 6, 2018, Ayanna was elected to represent Massachusetts’ 7th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, making her the first woman of color to be elected to Congress from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Ayanna believes that the people closest to the pain should be closest to the power, and that a diversity of voices in the political process is essential to crafting more effective public policy.
The wealth gap in this country is a serious and immediate challenge – especially in Massachusetts and Boston, which have some of the highest levels of income inequality in the nation. While those at the very top amass enormous fortunes, everyone else gets left behind. For workers in the middle class, stagnant wages cannot keep up with the rising cost of expenses like child care and rent, let alone allow families to save for retirement or other priorities. And those unemployed or underemployed are too often forgotten altogether. We have to fundamentally change a system that sends nearly all new wealth created in our economy to the top one percent, and leaves only crumbs for the vast majority of Americans.