Ahead of the February 28 election, the mayor talks to the Reader about the past four years.| ✍️ aarondgettinger👇
, many of the largest initiatives of her signature Invest South/West initiative were planned after she took office.
The Reader interviewed Lightfoot on Jan. 13, after she hosted an interfaith prayer breakfast honoring Martin Luther King Jr.You faced an unprecedented confluence of crises in your first term: the pandemic, the George Floyd uprising, a restive City Council, just to name a few. How do you navigate that as a new mayor?Very carefully. Look, it has been unprecedented.
And then also in our city, making sure that our most vulnerable residents: our seniors, our homeless, the people who were not connected to health care—those most vulnerable residents were the worry of many of us, me included, and making sure that we were doing everything that we could right away to reach out to them. That’s why we decompressed homeless shelters. That’s why we worked hand in hand with Sheriff Dart to ensure the Cook County Jail didn’t become a leading COVID hotspot.
Well first of all, I think that it’s important that I lead by example and that I’m unapologetic. You know well that over the arc of our history there have been prominent leaders from our community who never say the words, “I am gay.” That’s not me. And so I think that part of it is really important. I think the thing that we have done is make sure that we are supporting those existing places, both with beds but, importantly, programming in places of connection. Because when I was campaigning back in 2018 for example, I went to a shelter up on the north side, just north of Addison on Ashland, and remember thinking, “These folks need help and resources.
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