News Archives - Page 3 of 6

Overcoming the odds: Another foster youth’s story

March 27, 2018 by Omar Passons in News

Throughout the campaign, we have come to know many stories of other children in and out of foster care who have shown tremendous resilience in their lives. We are featuring these stories to help voters connect with the young people our policies seek to help. “Steven” is a great example. The identifying details have been changed to protect his privacy, but this is Steven’s story:

When Steven (name/details changed) turned 18 he realized, like many transitional aged foster youth, that he was quickly running out of options for a secure place to live, a steady nutritious food source, and support services he relied on for most of his life in foster care. When basic needs such as shelter and food go unmet or are insecure it seems like college typically gets bumped pretty far down on one’s list of priorities. Not for Steven. He knew a college education could provide expanded opportunities and greater financial security. So he set his sights higher and began applying to community colleges throughout the San Diego area.

As a bright young man who excelled in high school despite facing the unique set of challenges that come with being a foster youth, Steven was accepted to the majority of schools where he applied. Steven did not let the almost yearly moves to different foster homes and new schools deter him, nor the staggering statistic that only 3% of foster youth graduate from college. Steven was able to obtain a strong financial aid package which provided funds to cover most of his tuition, books, and supplies. However, with the majority of community colleges not providing any student housing, Steven was left without a secure place to live. How would he balance the demands of being a full time student while working two jobs just to meet his basic needs?

Transitional age foster youth approaching 18 are often at-risk of falling off of a figurative cliff – going from relatively secure housing, food, and support services, into an abyss of being on their own with little to no money, no access to resources, and no real opportunity. Steven knew these odds, but through connecting with a range of nonprofit organizations and community resources such as Wesley House Student Residence, he was able to advocate for himself to find a home. That effort enabled him to pave a path to success as a full time student who also holds down two part time jobs. Steven is currently on track to transfer to a 4 year college. It is often difficult for people to imagine our most basic needs such as food and shelter not being a given in our lives. Steven’s resilience will continue to serve him well. However, our County leadership must make a commitment to providing increased access to resources and support services for those like Steven, which will serve our entire community well, too.

Learn more – Podcast Episode 2: What the County Actually Does?

International Women’s Day: Recognizing the need to Press for Progress

March 8, 2018 by Omar Passons in News

Today is International Women’s Day – a day to celebrate the accomplishments of women worldwide and #PressforProgress. While strides have been made towards gender equality, we still have a very long way to go. The World Economic Forum’s 2017 Global Gender Gap Report shows us that gender parity is over 200 years away. This is unacceptable and it will take all of us to accelerate the change we need. .

My campaign has focused on the critical need to support our region’s children and our senior citizens. On their own, these are two very important issues about which I am passionate, but they are much more than that. These are also critical issues for the equal rights of women. According to the Family Caregiver Alliance, approximately 66% of all caregivers are women. This means that women are more likely than men to sacrifice their careers and dreams to care for their children or their parents. This social phenomenon has placed women at a huge disadvantage. According to the Family Caregiver Alliance, 29% of women forgo a job promotion because of their role as caregiver, 33% decrease their work hours, 16% quit their jobs, and 13% retire early. While these are personal decisions, societal pressures and expectations of women to care for others are significant reasons why women sacrifice so much for the ones they love.

Providing high-quality, affordable and accessible child care and stronger supports for seniors would move the San Diego region more quickly towards the equality women deserve. Providing these resources would help empower women by restoring their time and increasing the financial stability of many homes. Similarly, placing more economic and social value on caregiving by paying reasonable wages to qualified individuals would help change perceptions around the idea of caregiving. I recognize my privilege as a man in our society. It is a privilege that comes with an obligation to fight for equality. Our campaign is committed to providing greater leadership that will help our children and our region’s seniors. This leadership will also support moving towards gender equality and true opportunity for women and girls in our society.

Vote for the Panther, then go home

March 6, 2018 by Omar Passons in News

My team has been working very hard for months. So, to celebrate one team member’s birthday and thank them for showing up every day to help me fight for a better, more inclusive San Diego region we went to see Marvel’s new movie Black Panther. The movie was based on the first African American superhero comic book that made its debut in 1966. There are plenty of pieces online about the importance of positive depictions of Black characters in film and especially in earlier eras of American pop culture, so I won’t cover that ground. I did find a few things particularly noteworthy about the movie and I thought I’d share.

My first observation is about Shuri. She plays the tech-savvy sibling of King T’Challa (the Black Panther). She isn’t needlessly sexualized nor portrayed as surprisingly bright or unusually gifted – which is to say the story doesn’t make her ability to achieve seem at all out of reach. She is an intelligent, intellectually curious young person who shows how cool it can be to be “into tech.” Shuri was the hero of the first major car chase of the movie and even when the outsider CIA agent was flying a spacecraft to protect the world, he was doing so using the tech she created. Nice job, Team Panther.

The second big nod relates to the first for me. None of the women needed saving, none were scantily clad, and there was nothing particularly out of place about the elders, the general, or Shuri’s character all being women. There were men in leading roles, to be sure, but the movie didn’t feel to me to be nearly as gender-tilted as these can frequently feel. I’m a man so probably you should take my perception with a grain of salt, but that’s how it felt to me.

Finally, for those who stayed past the credits to the final scene, we were able to hear two very useful reminders. King T’Challa made the important point that we are generally better off building bridges with one another rather than barriers to separate us. As a San Diego native who is excited about Mexico’s role in our shared culture and heritage, this is something I’m happy to see at our own international border – where we quite literally have built a bridge between California and Mexico. The final note of the movie was something I am always glad to hear people reiterate. Our differences, no matter how deep or strong they feel, are never as deep nor as strong as the ties that bind us.

Many people may recall Queen Bey’s nod to the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in her Super Bowl performance a few years ago. What is far less well known in many circles is the voting rights connection to the Black Panther woven into the title of this post that pre-dated both the Marvel comic and the more well-known efforts led by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. In 1966, the same year that Marvel created the Black Panther character, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization was created in Alabama to create for African Americans the opportunity for a voice in political leadership. I am running for the San Diego County Board of Supervisors with the knowledge that my opportunity to represent our region’s most diverse district would not be possible without the sacrifices made in Lowndes County and many other communities.

As someone committed to our region’s youth, I am grateful for a movie that can help them believe it is okay to be excited about science and be excited to see images of humility, grace and strength in the characters of this movie. It was a fun movie with great action scenes and a classic good versus evil plot line, but it was a quite a bit more and I’m glad we took some time out to watch.

Homeless and Hungry: Shame on us

February 17, 2018 by Omar Passons in homelessness / News

At the invitation of a very kind man named David Mulvaney, I joined a group of volunteers to prepare food for San Diegans who do not have enough food to eat. We met at Father Joe’s Villages in San Diego, which is at 15th and Imperial, not too far from a major transit stop and across from the Metropolitan Transit System bus yard. I had been down there before, most recently on two tours of the property by the CEO Deacon Jim Vargas while I was deepening my understanding before releasing our Hope4Homeless plan (link below). Deacon Jim is the kind of compassionate, driven person necessary for this work, as the people in need have a range of very severe issues and the politics of truly helping can get messy.

I walked up the main courtyard and saw dozens of people. The men and women I saw were someone’s brother or sister or mother or father…and they were all struggling to make it. One good reason to spend time here is that it is an important reminder that the “homeless crisis” is about actual, flesh and blood human beings living in often awful conditions and in desperate need. It is a direct, specific reminder of the human difficulties involved – the disability, the varied hygiene, the mental health struggles…and the hunger.

We were assigned to the kitchen to help prep 900 hamburger patties from big tubs of seasoned raw meat. Four of us were ‘team hamburger’ and with the help of the chef we quickly formed an assembly line to push through our task. As the four of us stood and scooped and patted and shaped hamburger, we talked about our lives. I talked about running for the County Board of Supervisors and the elements of our Hope4Homeless plan, and about my biological mother’s own struggle with mental illness and homelessness. More importantly, I listened to the three men volunteering with me from three very different life circumstances share about their companies, their life journeys, and their commitment to making a difference.

In the end, as I left and reflected on my own experience I felt the anger well up inside me. I think when we allow ourselves to face homelessness and hunger up close it can light a more consistent fire to drive change. What we are doing now as a community is unacceptable and you can really feel how intolerable it is when standing among hundreds of hungry people who are trying to survive. I am grateful to have the opportunity to serve them, grateful to have volunteered with a few very decent people, and also grateful for the very direct reminder of why I wake up every morning fighting to represent the 4th Supervisor’s District. It is not to hold down some political post or build some stepping stone to the future. It is about fundamentally changing our system in this community to improve the lives – and opportunities – of the people across San Diego County.

You can read our whole Hope4Homeless plan here.

Hope4Homeless: My personal connection to this crisis

February 7, 2018 by Omar Passons in News

In my early 30s I received a letter from my biological mother. I grew up in San Diego’s foster care system so I did not know my mother for most of my life. In the letter, she asked me to go and thank her friends at the Neil Good Day Center for their help when she was homeless in San Diego. She was asking me to thank people who almost certainly were no longer there 25+ years later. I knew she had mental illness and was disabled, but I didn’t know the extent until I read that letter.

I did as she asked and as I walked from my car near 17th and Island past the discarded needles, trash, and sadness on the faces of the homeless men and women around me, the experience really impacted me. I didn’t find anyone who remembered my mother, but the experience stayed with me. It motivated me to do more.

I joined the board of Rachel’s Women’s Center and began to look for ways to better address homelessness. I joined the Board of United Way of San Diego County, who had been responsible for Project 25 – a wildly successful effort to house the most needy homeless San Diegans who were the highest users of health and law enforcement services. My biological mother’s life experiences shaped the contours of my life in ways I did not expect. I am grateful for the support I received, largely from the County of San Diego, and feel deeply that I have a debt to be repaid to help more San Diegans lead a life of dignity and opportunity.

We released our Hope4Homeless plan as a recognition that the County can and must do more to focus on systems for reducing homelessness and must take on a bigger leadership role. It is a big part of why I am running for the Board of Supervisors and I intend to drive that leadership if elected.

The unspoken homeless crisis: Supporting our seniors

February 2, 2018 by Omar Passons in News

San Diego County has seen a spike in homelessness among our senior citizens and we have not done enough to raise the priority and visibility of this critical need. By some research accounts, senior citizens make up the fastest growing proportion of San Diego’s homeless individuals in recent years. This Voice of San Diego article helps highlight some of the challenges. The data for our region makes clear that the County must act.

In this article by long-time senior activist Bill Kelly, he sounds an important alarm that we as County residents have not been heeding with nearly enough urgency. A few key statistics help highlight the challenges:

Approximately 240,000 seniors in San Diego County cannot afford the basic combination of food, housing, healthcare and transportation
Social Security payment average around $1,360 despite basic expenses exceeding $1,900
Ratio of working age individuals to seniors is shifting from 3-to-1 to 1-to-1 over coming decades

The truth about our existing – and growing – crisis among seniors for healthcare, housing, transportation, and even basic food security is that this is a serious problem for all of us, regardless of income. Seniors in failing health are disproportionately cared for by their female children – compounding the challenges women face while trying to close a persistent wage gap and, often, maintain primary responsibilities for children. The issue is also especially acute for members of the LGBTQ community, as our government policies long made it illegal to even have children – which places greater strain on individuals and peer networks.

The challenges are significant but help exists. St. Paul’s Senior Services runs the Program of All-inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) is exactly the type of comprehensive senior support that makes a huge difference. The challenge is that we have not sounded the alarm regarding scaling our support for such programs. PACE is funded by state MediCal coverage – which is health coverage for poor residents. I took a tour of St. Paul’s to make sure I had a firsthand appreciation of the issues.

As San Diegans look to shoring up our fraying and unstable safety net in the county, elevating system supports like this one will become critical. An important step in the process is making sure more people understand the crisis we are in so we can build the will now to address it. That’s exactly what I am pushing to do. Thanks for reading.

Running for ALL San Diegans: Labor leaders do not owe me anything

January 23, 2018 by Omar Passons in News

I received a note Friday night that the Labor Council – an umbrella organization made up of the leadership of over 100 affiliated unions in San Diego and Imperial Counties – decided to only invite one candidate in the race for County Supervisor to be considered for endorsement. I’d like to go to every organization that represents San Diegans, regardless of party affiliation or ideology. My policy positions and actions are shaped by my values and by listening to voters, so their representatives should have audience – if those leaders want one. In the case of the leadership of the San Diego/Imperial Counties Labor Council, it appears they did not want to hear me out or learn what I stand for.

Here’s the thing, though, that is completely their right to elect not to invite me in. They don’t owe me a thing. Let me explain.

It is my job to try to work with everyone, to be fair, and to be open-minded. It is the Labor Council’s job to represent their members as they see fit and to take or reject anything I say as they choose. I am a supporter of the A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI) San Diego chapter, for example. This is a group of primarily African American members of the United Domestic Workers Association, the labor union that represents in-home healthcare workers. My campaign manager and I went to their most recent general meeting on the 18th of this month. We went even though the leadership already decided to publicly support another candidate. We went because the issues in-home healthcare workers face are not less important because they endorsed someone else. We went because my values drive my actions.

The plumbers and hotel workers and caregivers and sheet metal workers and federal government employees and many others who are members of those unions deserve candidates who will fight for a better region for every San Diegan. That is what I’m doing. They will all benefit if we implement the tenets of our StrongStarts4All plan with things like affordable quality child care and after school support. They will all benefit from our campaign’s attention to making housing more affordable with an approach that recognizes, as our Housing4All plan does, we must have market and subsidized solutions.

I am grateful for the opportunity to fight for every San Diegan. I would prefer the chance to have an earnest dialogue with every constituent, but I do recognize that no group owes me the right to that dialogue. We will just keep working hard and fighting for what we believe in. Thanks for reading!

Building a strong campaign: Perspiration and persistence

January 22, 2018 by Omar Passons in News

The numbers are in. My campaign connected with over 16,000 individual likely voters between June and December last year. This included nearly 300 1-on-1 in person meetings and 174 community meetings. To put those numbers in perspective, that’s nearly 7 community meetings per week. For anyone who has attended a planning group or town council or neighborhood meeting, you can appreciate how much time, effort, and time away from family that is.

My team knocked on doors and attended community meetings and made phone calls. As a candidate, I personally knocked on the doors of thousands of San Diegans. I went to community picnics, houses of worship, children’s play groups, craft breweries, schools, union general membership meetings, business networking events and any other place people would have me.

Every action I took was based on one fundamental belief: I believe candidates should earn your votes with hard work, substance behind the positions we take, and the courage of real leadership.

Running for office is hard work, especially in today’s climate. Sandwiched around all of our critical voter outreach work was a daily push to raise the funds necessary to actually run a political campaign for a major office. That means sitting down and calling friends, colleagues, family and others in our community and asking them to help me be a champion for the 263,000 children under the age of five in San Diego County and the 240,000 seniors who cannot pay their basic necessities of life. I am not a career politician and I still remember making my first political donation. My wife and I really didn’t understand how important the donations were to the campaign process but we knew that there was no guarantee our preferred candidate would win. Now that I am calling and meeting with hundreds of people to have the same conversation, I have to be persistent and keep asking to get the support we need to reach our voter target on June 5th. The money helps us raise name identification, contact voters, and be sure we do all of it while paying campaign staff a legally permissible and livable wage.

With the election just under six months away, we have a ton of work to do and welcome everyone to join our volunteer outreach efforts. Join us in believing that elections aren’t pre-ordained by insiders with political connections. Join us in believing that hard work, passion, and relevant professional experience matter in who we elect. We are fighting for every San Diegan and look forward to continuing to work hard moving forward. Thanks for reading!

The Dirty Little Secret about Campaigns: Many cheat their employees

January 18, 2018 by Omar Passons in News

I decided to run for the San Diego County Board of Supervisors to fight for children. All children. Actually, all young people from babies to young adulthood. I also care deeply about senior citizens, in large part because I saw how hard it was for my own 84-year-old mother as she aged. I am an attorney by training, so I believe in the rule of law, and I have to say I was more than a bit appalled when I learned that many campaigns cheat the people who work for them.

I realized early on that to mount a serious campaign for a race with almost 100,000 people voting I needed professional help and I needed fundraising support. I retained a consultant and then, owing to some quirks in California law, hired two staff to help with fundraising. During the interview process, something jumped out at me – basically no one was used to being paid what the law in this state required! I have heard progressive friends and advocates talk about wage theft but I never imagined what I’d find. Almost everyone I spoke to said they were used to being “hired” as a 1099 independent contractor – a way to get around paying payroll tax, paid sick leave, and other essential costs. Worse, the few who did get hired as employees were essentially working for far less than minimum wage as misclassified employees rather than hourly ones with overtime and such.

I wondered, given how many people in my race for the Board of Supervisors have run multiple races before, how they paid their campaign staff in current and prior elections. As a private sector lawyer with business clients in the past who got sued all the time for this kind of stuff, I wondered how widespread this was over the last several election cycles. Unfortunately, I am not a journalist and I have never seen a local journalist dig into this issue, so we may never know how widespread it is in San Diego.

I do know this, for everyone working on my campaign, if you do work that properly qualified as salaried work, you get paid at least what the law requires ($41,600 in California in 2017). I found out about a training the local Democratic Party was doing so I asked if they offered any guidance about proper payment of campaign employees. It turns out they don’t offer this, so I hired an election lawyer to make sure we were on the up and up.

I should add, though, that some campaigns hire consultants who employ their own staff to work on campaigns. This is a perfectly acceptable alternative. It’s probably not okay for a company or trade group to pay its employee and then “loan them out” on company time as a volunteer – but I have heard of all sorts of questionable arrangements that never get actually questioned because campaigns are, by their nature, relatively short-lived.

As far as we can tell, there is NO EXEMPTION for campaign workers! We are all bound by the same laws that companies and non-profits are. If you want to pay your employee minimum wage, they’d better be getting overtime. If you call them salaried, they’d better be making at least the amount above. Otherwise, like the many past campaigns my interviewees mentioned, you are breaking the law and cheating your workers.

The essential role of women in San Diego’s future

January 16, 2018 by Omar Passons in News

Our campaign understands that San Diego communities – indeed our region as a whole – will be best served by having all of the voices in our community at the table. Better, at a table we create together, rather than having to ask for a seat at someone else’s table. This is especially true in the context of the voices of women in our region’s policy debates. Not just elected officials, but women of all backgrounds. Men and women alike have a crucial role to play in the equality of voices in our decision making.

We believe men have a supporting role to play in helping shape a new reality and this announcement is about recognizing that we have equal power, intellect, heart, and dedication and must all have equal voice. And it is about embracing a shift that is long overdue.

This is a press release my campaign sent out today and we are thrilled at the support we have built from diverse women across the 4th Supervisor’s District. Visit www.omarpassons.com/women-4-omar to view the current supporters and to join us!

Category: News