Educator Yasmine Pomeroy Could Be the Next Grassroots Leader Elected to LA City Council
Interview by Joaquin Romero
We spoke with Yasmine Pomeroy, a candidate for Los Angeles City Council in District 3. Pomeroy, an educator with experience as a part of the California Teachers Association State Council, is running on a platform that includes issues of public safety, housing, and climate action. Here, Pomeroy explains how her time as an educator prepared her for public service, weighs in on the importance of prevention on issues like homelessness, and talks about why she considers the slate of progressive candidates currently making waves in Los Angeles her “support system”.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
RIFT: You are an educator, an activist, and now a city council candidate. Just tell me a bit about yourself and what got you into running for office.
Yasmine Pomeroy: Sure. My career path has always been in education. I knew that when I started a career in education I wanted to focus on educational policy, and for a long time that was my line of focus. For years I thought that you had to go to law school in order to write educational policy, and it turns out there was this whole new world of opportunity for me. I ran for CTA state council last year, so I’m on the California Teachers Association state council, which is the top policy-making body for education at the state level.
That’s been a wonderful experience, and seeing what happens there has really opened my eyes to how broken our systems are. The time I started doing educational policy, and getting involved in CTA, was around the time the pandemic happened. If we have seen anything in this past year and a half, we have seen how fragile our systems are, and as educators we see it all. Even before the pandemic, we were seeing our students struggle with housing security, racism, homophobia. So once COVID happened, you really saw everything come to a head, and how there was no prevention for what happened, in education and in just the way we take care of each other, in making sure that our students and their parents and guardians are housed and have access to basic needs. Especially with how we have shifted to this online platform, we still don’t have municipal broadband, which is an abomination to me, because it’s something that could have been put into place years ago. We’ve been asking for it, and it could have prevented how many of my students just did not have access to wifi. I had students who had to drive to a Starbucks parking lot in order to do school.
When I first started in education, too, I knew I wanted to give back to my community. I actually teach at the same high school that I graduated from. That was a choice I made because I had teachers who were there for me, as support systems that helped me. If I didn’t have the support systems that I did, there is no way I would be in the position I’m in now. So I wanted to give back to my community. Education aside, kids need that point-person, because sometimes their teacher or their counselor is the only person during that day that says, “Hey, how are you doing?” or “What do you need help with?”, and is there to hold their hand and help them through whatever they need help with or whatever they’re going through.
And I wanted to do politics with this educational lens, and this lens of advocacy. Making sure that our most vulnerable population has someone — whether it’s me or whether it’s a service — they have someone to help them and prevent what we’ve been seeing in the past two years that has been happening to our city, and our most vulnerable in our city.
RIFT: So taking that history of education and activism, how do you make the decision that you’re going to run for city council, for this specific office. What goes into that decision?
YP: So, a lot of people ask why I’m not running for a position that’s specific to education. And I think there’s a couple of issues to that. The education sector, at the teacher-level, at the educator-level, is a very female-dominated field. So when I hear that question, specifically “why aren’t you running for school board or something else that’s specific to education”, I feel it is sexist, just because that type of question is typically not asked to a man. Their skills and what they practice, and what their next steps are are not questioned the same way that women are questioned. So that aside, women and especially women educators are boxed into that stereotype of once you’re in this specific field, you can’t step out of it.
So when we’re saying educators should run for office, and more women should run for office, we’re really saying that we’re seeing all of these different moving pieces from this lens, and we can take the skills that we have and take that a step forward to City Hall.
And so much of what happens at City Hall impacts education. Maybe not directly, but the decisions that are made with transportation directly impact my students and their parents. Because if a bus is late, they’re gonna be late to class. And then what happens? They get detention because they’re late to class. And then what happens? If they work, they can’t make it to work. So that’s just one example of many, but there are so many decisions that are being made that I don’t think are being thought through in this lens of how is it impacting young people? How is it impacting working-class people? How is it impacting people that are living paycheck-to-paycheck? How is a decision being made impacting someone where it might be the difference of $100 whether or not they can afford rent or food at the end of the month? I’m in education because I know I have an audience with my students, but I think that lens needs to go beyond the classroom.
RIFT: What you were saying there was very interesting. I took the time to read your bio on your website, and one thing that really struck me was you mentioning the need for a politics of representation, particularly on the level of city government. The necessity not only of having city council members or elected officials that look like the constituencies of the districts, but also ones that have that same working-class experience.
An interesting thing, a few months ago when I talked to Bryant Odega, who’s running in CD-15, he was talking about how his district, in its entire history, has never had a person of color as their representative, and has also never had a council member that lived above the San Pedro area. That’s really telling about the state of LA politics in general. I wanted to get your take on that. Are there communities in your district that are underrepresented right now in city government that you feel like you would be better able to serve?
YP: Absolutely. I am bicultural, my father is white and my mother is Iranian. We have a very high Iranian population on this side of the Valley and haven't had an Iranian representative in a space that is heavily Iranian. That, and then the first thing that comes to mind when we’re looking at our elected is age. The average age in LA is 35. So you’ve got a bunch of millennials who have lived through extreme trauma their entire lives. millennials and Gen Z have lived through 9/11, those of us who are on the older spectrum of being millennials, we’ve lived through the Northridge earthquake, we have lived through a recession, and now COVID. There hasn’t been room for us to breathe. And our experiences are so drastically different. Race aside, identity politics aside, millennials have crippling student loan debt. We are unable to save for anything because of our student loan debt. And that’s not something that the incumbent grew up with, that’s not something that our parents’ generation understands. They don’t get that working a minimum wage job isn’t gonna do it the same way it did in the 80s and 90s. So I think that alone, aside from identity politics, is just this lived experience of our generation in really understanding how to change policies that have directly impacted us. We are the first generation that has been unable to build wealth. We don’t own homes, we haven't been able to save.
So that American dream that so many of us have been told exists, we don’t see it. And I think we’re waking up. In the 2020 election alone, you saw progressive candidates get elected. So there’s a lot of hope, and that’s what I’m trying to focus on. We’ve seen a number of women of color being voted into Congress this past year. We’re seeing this shift in electoral politics where we’re no longer electing the traditional suit and tie, we’re going for the working class person, we’re going for that identity, we’re going for the person that we see ourselves in, because now we’re realizing that it’s possible.
RIFT: And tell me about policy. I want to hear your platform piece about housing and homelessness. Both are interconnected problems and both are issues that are, I would say, really hot-button ones in Los Angeles. What’s your vision for combatting those two crises?
YP: In this district in particular we have seen an increase in homelessness like we’ve never seen it before. So moving forward, what I’d really love to focus on with our campaign is preventative measures. And part of that is housing, but that’s not the only solution. We can talk about building affordable housing all day every day, and yes we need housing. The housing built for millennials and Gen Z is a fraction of that that was built for our parents’ generation, but that’s not necessarily going to solve the crisis that we’re in. We are really in a FEMA-status emergency. And just as a side note, it is baffling to me that the city is suddenly going to be able to house hundreds of thousands of people who are going to come in for the Olympics, but we can’t even take care of our people right now.
So we’re already seeing a lack of prevention, and we’re going to see an increase with homelessness. One; because we haven’t prevented anything, there have been no systems for helping people not fall into homelessness, and we’re also preparing for the Olympics, which is only going to exacerbate the problem.
So I would love to see different areas of focus to help prevent homelessness. If we had some kind of center, for example. In every single profession, for the most part, there is some kind of center for people to go to. If you’re a college student, and you need assistance with what classes to sign up for, there is a counselor who guides you. If you go to a doctor and you have a very specific need, they will give you a specialist. Why don’t we have that for people who are either on the brink of homelessness, or who are currently homeless. Have a space for them to go, so that we’re not just treating it like it’s a transaction. Because I think we’re looking at the homelessness crisis as one entity, rather than addressing every individual with individual needs.
So as far as policy, we need a system that helps with renter protections. I said earlier, sometimes people fall into homelessness because of the difference of $100 at the end of the month. They have to choose between food and paying rent. If the city had a pool of funding for people who were in that situation, and they had that extra $100 that month, that prevents them from becoming evicted. If there is a safe space for LGBTQ+ youth to go, that prevents them from ending up on the streets. If we had some kind of a renters’ tax credit, the same way that homeowners do, that helps them. And some of these, you can’t do on the city level, it would have to come from the state. But that doesn’t mean we can’t advocate for it at the city level.
RIFT: And what about public safety? Just a couple of days ago there was a video going around from a protest in the Wilshire area of a protester getting shot in the stomach with a less-than-lethal round, at point-blank range from an LAPD officer. Obviously that kind of thing happens all too often. The thing I hear from candidates like yourself is the need to reinvest money that would be going towards an institution like the LAPD into programs that are better serving the kinds of communities you have in the area. Can you describe your vision for that?
YP: Yeah absolutely. I am all for reallocating funding to different areas. Again, it comes back to prevention, and the police do not prevent crime.
In this district, what I hear folks talking about often is like packages stolen from their front porch. So the question is why are we seeing an increase in packages being stolen? Why are we seeing an increase in catalytic converters being stolen? Someone clearly needs that more than that person does. We have to ask these questions, and we have to educate folks about why there are certain crimes being committed, and it’s because people are hurting right now. Because we are not taking care of our community.
And we continue to throw money down the drain. I think it was in 2019 that we spent $30 million on homeless sweeps, and that did absolutely nothing in preventing homelessness, it did nothing in housing homeless folks, everyone just ends up in the same exact spot anyway. Right now…they're going to make it illegal to sit, lie or sleep within 100, 500 feet of a sidewalk or an underpass? What is that going to do? You’re just putting more people at risk of being arrested, and that money is continuing to be funneled into the police. So again, prevention. We need a lot of preventative measures and preventative services, and we are, as a city, very reactionary instead of preventative.
RIFT: There’s a point that you made in your bio on your website, that the future of LA politics lies in its organizers and its activists. I talk to a lot of people who are running for office, not just in LA but around California, and it seems pretty evident that there is a changing tide, particularly in terms of progressive politics. There’s a lot more people, a much greater volume of people like yourself, who are running for local, state and higher office. So talk about how you see yourself as part of that. Do you have contact with the other people who are running on similar platforms in LA? Do you know them personally? Is there a sense, I guess, that there is a changing environment in the area?
YP: Yeah. Myself and a handful of other progressive candidates are actually all in a Signal chat together, so we are already in contact. When I decided to run I had no intention of having a support system the way that I have found one. And with this shift, we all kind of found each other, and it’s hard to ignore that there is this progressive movement happening. And even though we don’t always agree on everything and we don’t agree on how to get there, we really do want the same thing. So you already have this community of organizers and activists, thinking long term about when we do win, what can we implement on our first day in office. And during the time before then, what can we do now to help our community? Like yesterday, I was at the March for Mely with Albert Corado [Mely Corado was shot and killed by LAPD], and a handful of activists, organizers and candidates were there. We have been in contact with each other, and finding different ways to not only support each other now, but what it is that we can do in the future.
