Chris Randall Photo
Ella’s Fund PAC organizers Pia Gero, Keisha Redd-Hannans, Karimah Mickens, Karen DuBois-Walton, and LaMara Russell.
Five Black, female civic leaders — including the city’s public housing chief, an assistant public schools superintendent, and the former president of a local sorority — have launched a political action committee aimed at translating this summer’s grassroots uprisings for racial justice into lasting state and local political power.
The name of that new organizing and fundraising body is Ella’s Fund PAC. The co-founders are Karen DuBois-Walton, Karimah Mickens, LaMara Russell, Keisha Redd-Hannans, and Pia Gero.
On “LoveBabz LoveTalk” Thursday morning.
On Thursday morning, DuBois-Walton, Mickens, and Russell spoke with WNHH-FM radio host Babz Rawls-Ivy on “LoveBabz LoveTalk” about the inspiration behind and mission for this new partisan initiative.
“This is just a moment when the whole country and this community is having a reckoning around racial inequities and racial injustice,” said DuBois-Walton. “One piece of that has to be our political power, and the reasons we build political power. This political action committee is one tool for funding, engaging, and supporting political power.”
The female co-founders said that they plan to use the PAC to raise money to support progressive candidates for state and local office in New Haven and Hamden, with a focus on “more marginalized communities,” particularly Black and brown communities.
DuBois-Walton said the candidates that Ella’s Fund will ultimately support must have proven track records, in grassroots and formal leadership, in promoting the various progressive ideals of the PAC, including: ending poverty, environmental justice, accessible health care, high quality education, homeownership and affordable housing, criminal justice reform, and economic development and wealth creation for Black and brown people.
Russell said that the mission of the new PAC is perhaps best encapsulated by one of her favorite quotes from the late civil rights leader Ella Baker, after whom the PAC is named.
“Oppressed people, whatever their level of formal education, have the ability to understand and interpret the world around them, to see the world for what it is, and move to transform it,” Russell said, reading the words of the woman who played such a key role in fundraising for and building political power for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the mid-20th century.
From Covid-19 And BLM Organizing To Political Power
Thomas Breen file photo
DuBois-Walton at a housing authority presser this summer.
The local women behind this new PAC are no strangers to social, political and public life in New Haven and Hamden.
DuBois-Walton is the current head of Elm City Communities/Housing Authority of New Haven, a member of the state Board of Education, a co-founder of Storytellers New Haven, and a former mayoral chief of staff. Redd-Hannans is a New Haven Public Schools assistant superintendent and former principal in the city school system. Mickens is a recently elected member of the Hamden Democratic Town Committee and the former president of the New Haven alumnae chapter of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. Russell said she has spent her career in finance; DuBois-Walton said that Gero is a business owner “passionately committed to affordable homeownership.”
All five are active members of the local Delta Sigma Theta alumnae chapter, which for years has hosted community forums on voting rights, the Census, and how to increase political engagement among New Haven’s Black and brown communities.
DuBois-Walton said that, unlike the non-partisan efforts of Delta Sigma Theta, this new, separate PAC will be explicitly and intentionally partisan. It will advocate for specific candidates and political causes.
“We are bonded through Deltas, but this is something we’ve done very separately from Deltas,” she said.
Mickens said that the PAC plans to provide a “101 basics” public education around local and statewide politics. She said the PAC’s website, social media feeds, and other promotional activities will shine a light on who New Haven and Hamden local and state elected officials are, what they are responsible for, and what elections are coming up and when.
DuBois-Walton stressed that the impetus for creating this new PAC came from the twin devastations of the Covid-19 pandemic and the “very visible, violent killings of unarmed Black Americans all across this country.”
Both of these crises have led to heightened public awareness about structural, racial inequities that continue to plague this country, she said. They’ve also inspired community activism and mass movements of people working to force this country to “reckon with its legacy and continued expressions of racial injustice and inequity.”
This PAC, she said, is designed to help translated that activism into formal political power.
Russell said that the PAC has set a fundraising goal of $10,000 by the end of the year, and that it is already halfway towards meeting that goal. She said individuals can give up to $1,000 per year; other PACs can donate up to $2,000 per year.
According to the PAC’s filings with the State Elections Enforcement Commission, Mickens is the chair of Ella’s Fund PAC, Russell is the treasurer, Gero is the deputy treasurer. Between June 26 and July 7 — the most recent SEEC filing period — the PAC reported raising $250.
Click on the above video to watch the full interview on WNHH FM’s “Love Babz Love Talk” program. Click here to read more about the new PAC.
I think this is great! Good luck with the efforts. I hope they reach out to the majority minority New Haven Board of A's and ask for a record of what that group has done to facilitate progress.
Dennis Serfilippi