While all eyes are set on the presidential race this November, another crucial election is happening in Atlanta. Back in March, Atlanta City Council member Keisha Sean Waites announced she would be resigning from her position a year before the end of the term to launch a bid for Fulton County Superior Court clerk. Of the five candidates running to fill her seat, Devin Barrington-Ward is the only member of Atlanta’s LGBTQ community and running on a people-first platform.
Barrington-Ward has almost two decades of community organizing experience, starting his work in 2006 with Stacey Abrams as a canvasser on his first campaign for the State House of Representatives. Since then, he has organized around LGBTQ youth homelessness, HIV prevention and treatment, the reimagining of public safety and law enforcement accountability, and housing justice. Now, he’s running for Atlanta City Council on a platform of housing as a human right, workers’ rights and living wages, green infrastructure, combating climate change, and public safety for all. Because Barrington-Ward is so involved with the community and grassroots work, he knows that these are the biggest issues facing Atlantans.
“These issues are based on the conversations that I have with people in neighborhoods and when they come to City Hall frustrated that something hasn’t gotten done,” he told Georgia Voice. “They are policy issues that are connected to statistics that many Atlantans know all too well, like us being one of the top cities for new cases of HIV, and Atlanta being the number one city for racial income inequality, for the lack of permanent shelter space for LGBTQ youth and a whole host of other unsheltered populations. This agenda is a working-class progressive agenda that is grounded in the needs of people and the people that I speak to and work with the community … I have this concept of what is called street-informed public policy. I don’t really prioritize issues that the streets aren’t talking about.”
Despite the disparity of attention paid between national and local elections — as well as the historic nature of this year’s presidential election and the potential of Kamala Harris to be the first Black woman president — Barrington-Ward believes that local elections actually have a far deeper felt impact on constituents.
“I would say that the majority of the issues that people are talking about are at the state and local level,” he said. “Oftentimes, the impacts of what a president does or does not do is not seen for many years, but the impacts of what is done by City Hall is felt almost immediately. When we’re talking about issues of housing affordability, when we’re talking about issues of mass transportation, when we’re talking about issues related to public health and how we end the HIV epidemic, much of that leadership is required at the local level.”
One plan he has to directly impact the lives of Atlantans is a baby bonds initiative, which would invest money for low- and middle-income children born in Atlanta into bonds that would earn them $30,000 to $64,000, which they could use to invest in their futures — just one example of the “transformative public policy that can be done [at the local level] with less bureaucracy than exists at the federal level.”
As a Black queer man, Barrington-Ward wants the Atlantans who make the city a Black queer mecca and cultural epicenter to see themselves in their leadership and use their voting power to advocate for themselves and their communities.
“If you don’t express yourself, you’ll erase yourself, and one of the most important ways to express yourself is through the ballot box, and so I think it’s imperative that queer Atlantans see the value of voting in this election,” he said.
To learn more about Devin Barrington-Ward’s campaign, visit devinforatlanta.us. To find your polling place or early voting locations, visit mvp.sos.ga.gov.