As the director of New Haven Rising and a student organizer with Students Unite Now, or SUN, the two of us have seen what’s possible when people organize together in New Haven, including our coalition’s success increasing Yale’s annual payments to the city through 2026. By standing shoulder to shoulder, workers, students and residents have secured local hiring commitments, stronger unions and increased city funding.

Since 2012, New Haven Rising has been developing leadership through popular education campaigns that bolster organizing across neighborhoods. Banding neighbors together to fight for racial and economic justice — New Haven Rising’s core mission — is also the foundation of Norah’s campaign for Ward 1 alder.

We’re glad to see more students engaging with this work. At the same time, we know racial justice in New Haven isn’t about saying the right things; it’s a sustained, collective practice. The struggles of working-class Black and Brown residents are inseparable from fights for union jobs, stable housing, quality healthcare and respect.

Scott’s father worked in construction and later as a custodian at what’s now Yale New Haven Hospital. That work was better than the sharecropping he left behind in North Carolina, but he still worked 80-hour weeks just to get by. In the 1990s, it was mostly Black men like him who lined up by Yale’s dumpsters, hoping for a day’s work in a dining hall. That was what opportunity looked like for many New Haven residents: segregated, exploitative and deeply unjust.

Norah grew up white and working-class in Kentucky, the daughter of a union public school teacher. In that mostly white community, many Latine neighbors worked as underpaid, unprotected migrant farm laborers. Seeing how race and class shaped whose labor was valued — and whose was exploited — left a deep impression.

Witnessing community members from her Catholic church underpaid for their work was infuriating. That anger, rooted in solidarity, fuels our shared commitment to racial and economic justice in New Haven. In any city, learning to turn values into action starts by showing up first to listen, then to organize.

In 2022, Norah attended her first Rally for Respect, led by Local 33, Yale’s graduate worker union that has improved the standard for work across academia. For her, it was the first time seeing thousands of workers unite and win. For Scott, it was the culmination of a decades-long fight against Yale’s history of union busting.

In 2023, Norah joined over 1,500 students and thousands of union workers who pushed Yale to reinvest in the Yale Health Center, improving care for students, workers, and dependents. The next year, New Haven Rising and SUN mobilized Ward 1 students in support of striking Omni Hotel workers with Local 217, who went on to win significant raises and health benefits for dozens of New Haven families.

That’s why we fight alongside organized labor to win for both workers and neighbors. We look to campaigns like Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral bid in New York, which connect racial justice to class struggle by confronting landlords, bosses and wealthy institutions alongside unions and working people. We are kin in that struggle. Just as UNITE HERE’s New York locals support Mamdani, New Haven Rising supports progressive candidates committed to building a movement of working people.

This campaign is just one part of that broader project. If we’re serious about justice, we need to connect electoral power with the places where people power is built: picket lines, church basements, tenant meetings and union halls.

Norah’s campaign for Alder grows directly from that organizing. This includes efforts at the state level as Ward 1 co-chair of the Democratic Town Committee by testifying before the Labor and Public Employees Committee and leading teams of union members to lobby in Hartford for stronger labor protections.

Today, Norah’s shared slate with New Haven Rising member Alder Frank Douglass is rooted in hundreds of conversations with neighbors about rent hikes, evictions, school underfunding and job insecurity. Our shared platform calls for affordable housing, good union jobs, youth opportunity and education, and a fully funded city. To realize this vision, we need to support tenant unions, protect families from displacement and expand local hiring into good union jobs. We’ll also need major investments in afterschool programs, vocational training and youth mentorship.

And to pay for it all, we must build a coalition large enough to move real resources into the city. We’ve already forged a working-class alliance that produces results. We can hold Yale and other wealthy employers accountable to the city they depend on.

Our coalition has done it before; the struggle and our wins come from decades of committed partnerships grounded in shared vision. In this Democratic Primary, vote for Norah Laughter. Then join a New Haven Rising canvas, and rally with Yale workers on Sept. 25. Standing side by side, we all win.

NORAH LAUGHTER is a senior in Pierson College studying American Studies. She can be reached at norah.laughter@yale.edu.

REVEREND SCOTT MARKS is Director of New Haven Rising. He can be reached at marksscott16@gmail.com.