February 2024 Student Spotlight

We talk to MPA student and Organizing Director at New Yorkers for Equal Rights, Nia Alvarez-Mapp about her love of studying voting behavior and activism, the Sacred Worker podcast she executive produces, and more.

Tell us about your role as Organizing Director at New Yorkers for Equal Rights. What are you trying to accomplish?
New Yorkers for Equal Rights is a Ballot Initiative Committee composed of civil rights, gender justice, reproductive rights, and immigrant rights organizations advocating for the passage of the New York Equal Rights Amendment. The New York Equal Rights Amendment will appear on voters’ ballots in New York State in November 2024.This amendment would explicitly prohibit discrimination based on a person’s ethnicity, national origin, age, disability, and sex—including their sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes, reproductive healthcare and autonomy. My job in this wonderful campaign is to oversee all grassroots organizing efforts, grass tops, relationship building and overall field strategy for the campaign aligned with the Campaign’s path to victory. Most importantly, hoping everyone from Baruch shows support for November 2024 by flipping the ballot on election day and voting yes. Here the website for any curious.

Can you talk a bit about the Sacred Worker Podcast you produce?
Sacred Workers is a podcast that I am the executive producer with an organization called Interreligious Network for Worker Solidarity (IN4WS). The IN4WS is to offer faith as a lens in the worker justice movement as we learn from everyone which could be you, a sacred worker, unions, and general people of faith fighting for rights that will allow workers to thrive and be treated with dignity. So far, we have covered topics such as the summer of strikes that have been happening, especially with WGA and the current SAG-AFTRA strike, to SEIU Texas with airport workers unionizing, or the Starbucks Union in Georgia. We are currently working on expanding the ideas of what it means to be a part of the labor movements in the religious-spiritual context and being religious-spiritual is a labor context. Most importantly highlighting the dignity and rights of workers throughout the United States and what we can do to help. What we are seeing currently with all the labor actions that happened now and last summer is a testament that something has got to change, and we want to use this platform to give voice to that idea. If anyone is curious to listen, our main platforms are Spotify and apple music.

What are you studying at the Marxe School? How has your experience been thus far?
I must confess I am a huge voting nerd and I love studying voting behavior and how to engage people on their voters’ right and just general civil engagement. I recently graduated from Union Theological Seminary (UTS), and although I cannot officiate anyone’s wedding, I am hoping to expand my research on the religious impact of 2016 to 2020 election cycles. So often we look at religion-spirituality in negative connotations, but I would like to think of it more under how the core teaching help can us to find peace, righteousness, and justice in an unjust world. Historically in the United States, social movements and meetings were in sacred spaces, activists were clergy and to know the next action you had to show up on Friday/Saturday/Sunday and this holds true even today. So, in summary I went to UTS to understand Politics in a religious context and now I am hoping to understand religion in a political context.

What has fueled your interest in activism?
But the people that fueled it I give absolute thanks to my parents especially my mom and grandmother for being so civically engaged throughout my entire life and beforehand. I think the minute my grandma (she also went to Baruch) came to this country (Honduras) she hit the ground running. She was both a Black Panther and Young Lord in El Barrio and said what she wanted. She was a founding member of the first community school in East Harlem (East Harlem Block school) also part of the group of parents in East Harlem that spoke with Mayor Lindsey about representation teaching in the schools resulting in Paraprofessionals being hired from the community. Which of course influenced my mother who does great work in education especially for children with learning differences, children with incarceration backgrounds via themselves or family and LGBTQIA youth and their families. Which is where of course lead me to being the person I am today. I remember being a 7-year-old kid doing homework in the back while my mom led/attended her school/community board meetings. Now 20 years later my mom just ran a parent-community conference at the United Federations of Teacher and where was I? In the back doing homework. Also want to give a quick shout out to my mentees who inspire me to work as hard as I do.