#ElectAAPIs2020: A Conversation with Helen Gym
City Councilmember Helen Gym has been called the city’s loudest mom, a beloved teacher, a “fierce warrior for the city’s schoolchildren,” and Philadelphia’s “most popular politician. Even before coming onto City Council, she was one of the city’s most visible organizers — fighting off a stadium and casino in Chinatown and winning a federal lawsuit for immigrant students facing racial bias and harassment in their high school. Since coming into office in 2016, Helen Gym has continued to lead campaigns that establish a human rights agenda for the city and take on corporate power and waste. As a champion for the city’s schoolkids, she helped end a 17-year state takeover of the public schools and won clean water access, arts and music, and counselors, nurses, and social workers in every public school. She led the protests against the Muslim Ban at the Philadelphia airport, fought alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders against the closure of Hahnemann Hospital, called for a municipal Green New Deal, campaigned for free public transit fares for kids, and shut down juvenile justice institutions like Wordsworth and Glen Mills when they were found to abuse and hurt young people. She’s been at the forefront of labor rights, winning groundbreaking policies like a Fair Workweek law that guarantees stable schedules for hourly workers and pay for canceled shifts. She has also authored national news-worthy resolutions welcoming Gritty to Philadelphia and uplifting the #MuteRKelly movement. Lately, she’s been hard at work making sure families are protected from eviction and holding Comcast accountable for providing free internet access to students.
Councilmember Gym is Co-Chair of Local Progress, a national network of progressive local elected officials working for economic and racial justice and making sure cities serve everyday working people, not corporations.
*NOTE: Councilmember Gym is not currently up for re-election. She was re-elected to a four-year term in 2019.**
- When and why did you decide to run for office? Was there a specific experience or moment that inspired you?
It’s hard to say that there was one moment that made me think about running for office, but if I had to pick one, it would have been the night of a school board meeting in 2013 when 24 public schools were shuttered and closed down as a result of District budget cuts. Before that, I had been a longtime community organizer and was very active around improving our public schools. I fought the state takeover of my children’s school district in 2000, and over the years had been part of building an education justice movement.
We had been fighting a Republican governor who had slashed a billion dollars from the state education budget. As a result, we lost 4,000 staff members, including nurses, counselors, teachers and more. My son started his freshman year in high school with 60 students in his biology class and 40 in his algebra class. There was one counselor assigned to every 2,000 students, and children died in schools without school nurses. The night that the state takeover commission closed down our public schools, we had packed over 1,000 people inside and outside of the school building in protest. The vote happened in less than two hours.
We lost the vote, but I knew we had taken an issue about schools and made it an issue about our city and our future. After grieving and mourning, we got back up and organized fiercer than ever. The following year we threw out that Republican governor who had been the face of those budget cuts. The year after that were the Philadelphia municipal elections. The stakes were extremely high. Over two dozen people got in the race for City Council, and I was hoping to find a candidate who could carry forward a real vision for schools that I and so many others had fought so long for. After waiting and waiting, I realized that the person who could do it best was me.
It was my first run for public office. The movements and communities I had fought alongside propelled me into City Council in 2015 and made sure I was re-elected by historic margins last year. Once I was on Council, they were the forces who helped win an end to that state takeover, restored basic resources into schools, and helped move some of the City’s biggest legislative and budgetary campaigns through my first term, including protecting families from eviction and expanded labor and civil rights. To this day, I believe our greatest power lies in organizing spaces outside of City Halls, state legislatures, and Congress. I see my work as part and parcel of the movement building work I came out of.
2. Local races like yours sometimes don’t garner as much attention as state or national ones. Why should everyday people care about their local government and down-ballot races?
I am a big believer in municipal elections as much as I am in local organizing. I am vice chair of an organization called Local Progress, and we’re all local elected officials. If you’re angry about the state of your public schools, recognize that school boards have more power to hire teachers of color, enact anti-racist curricula, and de-police schools than the Secretary of Education. If you’re fighting for criminal justice reform, you need progressive prosecutors, judges, and defenders. If you’re fighting against evictions and for affordable housing, then Mayors and City Councils can do as much to move sensible housing policy as Ben Carson’s HUD. From City Council, I’ve fought for everything from water access to a Green New Deal to housing justice, expanded labor rights, and ending ICE contracts and protecting immigrants.
What people are hungry for right now is a new type of politics that is driven by a need for change that is inextricably linked to communities. Local races bring that energy to politics. You can be as inspiring on a school board as you can in the halls of Congress — and probably more so! So what are we waiting for?
3. Your background is in teaching and community organizing. How have your career and your organizing experience informed your agenda as a city councillor? Similarly, has your AAPI heritage influenced the initiatives you support and the issues you care about? If so, how?
I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, the oldest daughter of Korean immigrants. I struggled for years to find my voice in a world often defining race along a Black-White binary. That changed when I decided to volunteer at a tiny Chinatown non-profit called Asian Americans United. A friend of mine said I had to get to know the women there who could “change the world.”
At Asian Americans United, I found a true political home. The people around AAU had been part of the civil rights struggle as SNCC workers, mobilized against apartheid and nuclear power, fought for LGBTQ rights, and shared a deep understanding of America’s political history as Asian American movement activists that I had never encountered in any formal schooling. Not surprisingly, many of us were public school teachers too. I met ancestral icons like Yuri Kochiyama, Grace Lee Boggs, and Philadelphia AIDS activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya.
I spent the next two decades with Asian Americans United, building gardens, establishing folk art festivals, running youth leadership programs, and taking on citywide campaigns for justice. I cut my teeth fighting mayors and developers who would sacrifice a Chinatown neighborhood for publicly funded boondoggles like a sports stadium and casino. I fought for quality public schools and organized boycotts with recent immigrant youth fighting to end racial harassment and bias in their schools.
From this work, I learned how white supremacy and patriarchy are pillars of an unjust and unequal order and made Philadelphia the nation’s poorest large city. I see these systems at work in the criminal underfunding of our public schools, in the refusal to raise the minimum wage, in the quality of our housing, in the mass incarceration of Black and Brown people, and in the for-profit detention and deportation of our immigrant brothers and sisters. I never sought solutions in spaces where white supremacy and patriarchy are built. Instead I center the voices of communities working to tear down those systems. I remain eternally grateful to have learned that alongside brilliant AAPI organizers in Philadelphia.
As an elected official, I honor my AAPI organizing roots by carrying forward a people’s campaign that centers and strengthens organizing in our city and works toward our collective liberation.
4. What are some of the most memorable moments of your time as a city councillor so far?
I’ve been so fortunate to have had so many memorable moments. I got to write legislation to formally reinstate a local school board and witness the end of a 17-year state takeover of our public school district that I had fought against for two decades. Middle and high school students on my student town halls and school visits led a clean water campaign and new investments for Philly public schools. I loved winning our Fair Workweek campaign, when we filled City Hall with hundreds of people calling for an end to abusive scheduling practices and poverty wages.
After I called for the taking down of a statue of a controversial and bigoted former Mayor, I held a 50th anniversary event honoring Black high school students who in 1967 had walked out of their schools in one of the largest student demonstrations for Black and ethnic studies in the country; those students had been physically beaten with billy clubs and batons by police officers who were ordered to attack them by that Mayor. At the 50th anniversary event, hundreds of elders showed up and gave speeches making the connection between student organizing then and now. I was incredibly proud to shine a light on that piece of history. It (almost) made the hate mail I received worthwhile.
But probably, one of my most memorable days in office was in January 2017, the day after the White House issued the unconstitutional travesty known as the Muslim ban. It was on a Saturday evening, Lunar New Year, and I was in the middle of cooking a traditional Korean dinner when I got a call from the Mayor’s team that families were being detained at our airport and could be deported at any moment.
“Bring people. Now.”
What could I do, but act? I put out the call on social media and hundreds of people answered. By the time I got to the airport, the terminal was full of people chanting, “Let them in.” And when the people came, a congressman followed, then a US Senator, a governor, and suddenly the dynamic of power had shifted.
We marched and we chanted, we locked arms and we showed that our hearts were big enough to embrace the entire world. At 2 a.m. a stay of deportation came out of the federal court in Philadelphia, and those families weren’t deported that night. The next day Philadelphians poured into the airport by the thousands. This happened in cities all around the country. And when we filled these spaces, we made clear that the law and our constitution are more than words on a page. They came to life as a vibrant, passionate statement of the cherished values of our democracy.
I’ve worked all my life to show people that collective action makes meaningful change, and all we have to do is act together relentlessly and lovingly — and sometimes, we get to see it happen.
5. Today, many young activists are disillusioned with electoral politics, and with change “within the system” that often seems incremental. What is your message to these young people, and what do you think is the importance of voting and volunteering for campaigns, in addition to grassroots community organizing, protesting, etc.?
For me, politics doesn’t begin or end at the ballot box. As a longtime community organizer, my politics don’t start with politicians. It starts with us — with the people we love, the issues we care about, and the campaigns and activities that get us up and out of the door because it feels too important or exciting to miss. More than at any time in recent memory, I see young people not only getting politicized about this moment, but leading the political movements which are defining this time — the Fight for $15, Black Lives Matter, gun control, paid sick leave, the Green New Deal, #AbolishICE, and stopping the privatization of our public schools. The movement sweeping through our streets and our communities is powerful, and for me, our politics are only as big as our movements.
My advice: Stay local. Congress and the White House are a horror show, and it’s critically important to vote in people who share your values and vision. But you don’t have to wait around for a new Congress. You can make change locally, and often in significant ways. I’ll admit I’m biased, but the local campaigns that are happening for municipal and state offices are among the most exciting campaigns for people to be a part of — you door knock and talk to neighbors, you flyer and create great slogans and graphics. And more important, you elect people who can make change in your lifetime. I worked for 20 years to end a state takeover of our public schools, and when I came into office led the charge to actually make that happen. Philadelphia elected a lifelong civil rights defender as its District Attorney and we were able to reduce the jail population enough to close down a county jail in less than two years.
Change isn’t easy, but it doesn’t have to move at a glacial pace all the time. Invest in movements, stay passionate, VOTE, then keep on going. Nothing is fixed in this world, least of all power.
6. What advice do you have for AAPI youth wanting to run for office?
AAPIs are so often marginalized and silenced, so for me, the most important advice is for you to find a place that helps you grow politically and find your voice. I shared how important it was for me to have a political home like Asian Americans United, where you have the opportunity to learn and lead and be in a place that makes you endlessly curious and excited and hopeful about the world. If you’re interested in running for office, you don’t need political experience, but you do need to have a set of experiences which motivate you to run with passion and conviction, and give you credibility that you can communicate to total strangers. Your ability to communicate your story is essential. Your voice at 15, 16, and 17 on climate justice, on policing, on the state of your schools, or your family’s immigration situation will never be more important than it is right now. The work you do now, the relationships and trust and integrity you build, will define you and make your work authentic and compelling to people meeting you for the first time — and that’s the start of politics.
You can read more about Councilmember Gym in profiles in the Philadelphia Inquirer and at Philadelphia Magazine. She was a keynote speaker at Netroots Nation 2019, and authored an op-ed in 2016 on AAPIs and the progressive movement for Angry Asian Man.
Website: www.helengym.com
Official City Council page: www.phlcouncil.com/helengym
Find her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter at @HelenGymPHL and @HelenGymAtLarge
The Young Politicasian is a project of the High School Democrats of America Asian American Pacific Islander Caucus. Follow us on Instagram @hsda_aapi, join the caucus, and apply to be a staff writer. The opinions expressed in The Young Politicasian do not necessarily reflect those of the AAPI Caucus or the High School Democrats of America.
