Editor’s note: This story is the second in a two-part series looking at how the left is organizing in electoral races in western Massachusetts amid Donald Trump’s second term in office. Part one explores this trend broadly. This story focuses on one particular local candidate.
Jill Brevik walked into Cushman Market and Cafe in North Amherst with a dark green keffiyeh, a traditional Palestinian scarf, draped around her neck. The community organizer and mother of two, running for one of District 1’s two seats on Amherst’s Town Council, left some campaign literature at the eatery’s counter and grabbed a coffee before sitting down with The Shoestring to discuss her campaign.
Brevik is a co-founder of Valley Families for Palestine, a local group that organizes family-friendly demonstrations and events in solidarity with Palestinians, and has been active with Amherst’s Support Our Schools group, which advocates for increased education funding in the town and larger school district.
But she said it was the broad appeal of Zohran Mamdani’s boldly progressive New York City mayoral campaign that helped inspire her to make the leap into local electoral politics.
“There’s a place for organizing outside of electoral politics and it is very powerful,” she said, but added that “without the electoral politics piece, we’re losing.”
“We’re spending a lot of organizing time trying to move candidates, either at the state level or the federal level or sometimes, when we’re talking about these municipal resolutions, like right in our own towns,” Brevik said. Local activists’ energy would perhaps be better spent on running ambitious campaigns that pursue the change they’d like to see, she added.
Brevik is one of a wave of progressive and leftist candidates seeking office this election cycle across western Massachusetts, from smaller local races to state and federal seats. She’s running on a platform of increasing funding for Amherst’s public schools, greater police transparency and accountability, and finding solutions to Amherst’s housing woes. And she’s not shying away from global issues like the genocide in Gaza and its local implications.
Brevik described District 1, which includes parts of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and much of North Amherst, as “a community that is very pro-working class [and] pro-union.” Having recently earned the endorsement of the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter, Brevik said she believes her would-be constituency shares “a lot of the DSA values,” and that she hopes to get River Valley DSA involved in other local organizing efforts beyond her campaign in the near future.
When pressed on what sets her apart from District 1 incumbents Cathy Schoen and Ndifreke Ette, Brevik didn’t offer a direct comparison.
“I prefer to speak generally rather than specifically about any one candidate or another,” she said.
Instead, Brevik emphasized her independence.
“I’m not aligned with developers or Amherst Forward,” Brevik said, referring to the political action committee that emerged from the movement to change Amherst’s government, doing away with Town Meeting and creating the 13-member Town Council. She also highlighted her lack of connections to UMass Amherst. According to Brevik, small-dollar donations from friends and supporters, many of which make up her campaign committee, have kept her campaign afloat.
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Brevik and her family moved to Amherst in 2020 from Boston, hoping to find a quiet place to settle with quality schools before she and her husband’s oldest child reached kindergarten. Brevik cites her experience growing up in a quiet town in central New Jersey where her family had moved from Long Island to “move out of a densely populated area” and “have more open space and nature and good schools.”
But, by the time Brevik was in high school, she said “most of the farms had been developed into really dense housing,” with her hometown becoming a “bedroom community” where many residents would commute to New York City. As a result, she said schools became overcrowded, the quality of education suffered, and her hometown was “hollowed out.”
Brevik is afraid the same could happen to Amherst, which is why her campaign is highlighting the connections between a local housing crisis and the quality of local public schooling.
When asked for specifics on her housing policy, Brevik expressed support for a moratorium on development in Amherst’s downtown business district, as well as for minimum distance requirements, which she said would put limits on the amount of rental properties allowed in a given area in an effort to protect Amherst neighborhoods. She hopes to prevent the development of open space, which she called “irreversible,” and suggested that UMass Amherst should build more student housing to ease pressure on the rest of the town.
Brevik emphasized her campaign’s focus on “supporting programs that help families afford homes, that keep tenants protected,” and that “keep private investors from buying up our real-estate.” She said she’s actively soliciting signatures for a state-wide rent control ballot initiative.
As the conversation turned to policing, Brevik pointed to Amherst’s commitment to progressive approaches to public safety. She noted that in 2021, the town was among the first in the country to approve an unarmed, civilian-response department as an alternative to the police — Community Responders for Equity, Safety, and Service, also known as CRESS.
Officially launched in 2022, CRESS responds to non-violent incidents such as wellness checks and mental health crises.
“We in Amherst share a lot of the same basic values. I think it’s actually one of our huge assets,” Brevik said of the town’s approach to policing. But she said she lamented CRESS’s decline in funding since its implementation in 2022. “I would push to fully fund CRESS, bring it back up to the levels that it initially was receiving,” she said, adding that if elected she’ll pursue more effective routing of emergency calls to CRESS.
On top of pledging increased support for CRESS, Brevik said she wants to see cops out of her children’s schools.
“I am a parent of kids in the public schools and I have seen police officers at field day, at our multicultural night, in lots of situations where I feel like their presence is threatening,” she said.
Louai Abu-Osba is one of Brevik’s campaign co-chairs. A Palestinian-American, Abu-Osba said that some have criticized the pro-Palestine movement as a “single-issue” coalition. He said he and others in the movement, like Brevik, see connections between seemingly far-off geopolitical issues and everyday local challenges — what he and Brevik repeatedly called the “imperial boomerang.”
“Grassroots organizing around Palestine actually has an immense amount of cultural power in the United States, unlike anything we’ve ever seen in the past,” Abu-Osba said. “But in order for that to have influence on politics, the way we educate children, what we’re spending our tax money on, and things around policing, it requires that we get people in the movement elected.”
That’s why, Abu-Osba said, he’s involved with Brevik’s campaign.
“The issue of Palestine has really opened up optics into parts of U.S. policy that were really hard to understand and really obfuscated by tremendous amounts of propaganda,” he said.
Abu-Osba recalled the UMass Amherst encampment protests in the spring of 2024, which he described as peaceful and even jovial.
It came as a shock to him, he said, when he saw Gov. Maura Healey insinuate that the protest was antisemitic days after police violently cleared the encampment and arrested hundreds, including Brevik, at the discretion of UMass Amherst Chancellor Javier Reyes.
“And then what happens to me as a Palestinian community member as a result of that? One of my neighbors visited my property and vandalized my [pro-Palestine] lawn signs, shredded them up, and left them on the ground, because that’s what he was hearing in the news,” Abu-Osba said.
Abu-Osba said that the experience deepened his belief in the need for elected officials who are accountable to their communities rather than outside interests.
“That is like the very clear, localized example of the entire imperial boomerang coming back to roost,” he said.
Brevik was eager to highlight what she sees as the barriers facing everyday people pursuing public office.
To run a successful campaign, Brevik said she “can say with certainty that even just coming along this far in the process, you need an immense amount of privilege.” She added that she’s hoping to collaborate with other local progressive candidates and help them navigate the challenges of an electoral race, from setting up websites to designing campaign materials.
Early in her campaign, Brevik and her committee focused on building social media engagement. Now, with Election Day approaching, she and her volunteers, including her husband and children, are knocking on doors across the district, recently joined by members of River Valley DSA.
“I firmly believe that we need everybody doing everything, from all angles,” Brevik said of the network of local progressive activists and organizers who are looking to the ballot box.
Dan McGlynn is an investigative reporter covering social movements and institutional power in western Massachusetts. He can be reached at danmcglynn@protonmail.com. Follow him on Instagram @danmcglynn_ or on X @danmcglynn_.
