For decades, New York State has funneled people experiencing mental health crises not towards treatment, but into our jails and prisons. Our jails have become the largest psychiatric treatment centers, and instead of receiving treatment, care, and rehabilitation, people face abuse that means they are more destabilized and traumatized when they leave than when they enter. This cycle must stop.

Phara is championing the Treatment Court Expansion Act in the Assembly to ensure that treatment, not jail, is the first option for someone facing a mental health crisis.

What would the 57th district be without our immigrant neighbors? We are a neighborhood that is  made stronger by those who came here from Haiti, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Mexico in search of a place where they could raise their children in peace and live a dignified life.

The Trump administration has given New York a choice: abandon our immigrant neighbors or face military occupation, violence in our streets, and massive cuts in federal funding. Phara will never abandon our immigrant neighbors. That is why she is fighting to end all collusion between New York State and ICE by passing New York for All.

As a nurse, Phara has seen firsthand how the private market, insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, and private hospitals profit from suffering. In order to ensure that all New Yorkers have the dignity of being able to seek medical treatment, we must pass the New York Health Act which would create a single-payer healthcare system here in New York. Phara has also championed funding for safety net hospitals, rate increases for Medicaid, and state support for people impacted by the Trump administration’s cuts to healthcare coverage.

Every New Yorker has the right to a safe, stable and affordable place to live. Our current system is in the hands of a profit-driven real estate model that places financial speculation and profit over the dignity of a stable home. Phara believes that we must transform housing from a vehicle for individual profit into a collective, socially controlled good, by creating  a Social Housing Development Authority.

Phara became an organizer to stop a landlord from evicting her family and turning their apartment into luxury condos. She is fighting to build tenant power by passing the Tenant Opportunity  to Purchase Act and the REST Act.

Phara unequivocally believes all tenants should live without the fear of eviction when their lease comes up for renewal. She also supports a deed theft eviction moratorium to prevent the displacement of residents who are fighting to preserve their family homes.

Phara strongly believes in the necessity of expanding funding and resources for public education, and has been a champion of the New Deal for CUNY. She has also introduced the New Deal for SUNY, because she believes that higher education must be available, at no cost, to all New Yorkers regardless of income.

As a proud graduate of SUNY Geneseo, CUNY SPS, and CUNY City Tech, Phara knows that our public schools are an exceptional resource which we must invest in and to which all New Yorkers must be given access.