35th District Candidate Profile: Laurie Cumbo
In the interest of giving locals a clearer view of the community members running for the 35th District City Council seat, The Nabe has profiled each of the five Democratic candidates. Without a Republican running for the spot, whomever wins the Democratic primary on Sept. 10 takes the abdicated seat, representing Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant and parts of Crown Heights. Check back next week for the next candidate profile in our five-part series.
On her way to a campaign stop this summer, Laurie Cumbo, a candidate for the 35th District City Council seat, paused to chat with a woman carrying pen-and-ink drawings she had made on the train.
“These are really good, wow,” said Cumbo. “I’m Laurie Cumbo, do you know I’m running for city council?”
As the director of Fort Greene’s Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), Cumbo knows her art. Now she’s turning her focus on politics, running to replace Letitia James for the 35th District City Council seat.
Cumbo has raised the most money out of the five candidates in the race, according to the most recent filings with the New York City Campaign Finance Board, more than $100,000, compared to closet candidate, Ede Fox, who has raised about $81,000. So far Cumbo has spent around $33,000, and around $16,000 of that has gone to The Advance Group, a strategic consulting firm, bolstering her campaign with a strong social media presence and a constant attendance at community events and fundraisers. About 500 volunteers have signed up to help her campaign, she said.
The city’s Campaign Finance Board is investigating whether Cumbo underreported artwork donated to her campaign during a January fundraiser, reported the New York Daily News. Following Campaign Finance Board guidelines from 1989, Cumbo asked the artists to report the cost of the materials used to create the pieces, which was $3,980. Rival Ede Fox said that she should have reported the $9,900 the pieces fetched at auction.
In addition, Cumbo has come under fire after the political action committee Jobs for New York, made up of powerful corporate and real-estate leaders, sent out brochures in support of Cumbo’s campaign. Though Cumbo disavowed the mailers, Fox has added heat to the race by calling her repudiation of Jobs for New York a “typical two-faced political ploy.”
Cumbo submitted more than 10,000 petition signatures to the New York City Board of Elections, according to her campaign. The minimum number of signatures needed to get on the ballot for a primary is 450. Cumbo has also picked up major labor support from the Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ, the largest property service workers’ union, as well as the 1199 SEIU Healthcare Workers United and the United Federation of Teachers. The progressive Working Families Party has also endorsed her bid for City Council.
Cumbo said she decided to run for political office when she realized she was spending most of her time in Albany and at City Hall fighting for resources for her museum and other city non-profits.
“I believe you should run for office when you’ve hit your threshold of what you can do as a private citizen,” said Cumbo. She said her experience founding and running MoCADA has prepared her to serve on the City Council, pointing to the student internships, jobs and cultural programs she’s created through the museum as “tangible” contributions to the community.
“The thing that frustrates me most is when people say ‘Laurie is good, but her experience is in arts and museums, not politics,’” said Cumbo. “But politics should be about the betterment of your community.”
Cumbo said that she has good working relationships with all mayoral candidates, excluding Anthony Weiner, whom she hasn’t had occasion to work with. Through her position at MoCADA, Cumbo said she has also developed relationships with real estate developers in Brooklyn and has been involved with round-table discussions and focus groups on diversity and arts and culture during development projects at BAM and the Downtown Brooklyn Business Improvement District.
If elected, Cumbo said she wants to focus on improving living conditions for New York City Housing Authority residents. She envisions a transformation in NYCHA similar to the crackdowns on graffiti in the subway and the creation of Arts for Transit program that installed public art in subway stations in the 1980s, following the popularization of the “broken window” theory, which posits that neighborhoods that appear broken-down and neglected attract more crime and vandalism.
“I want people to live in places where they feel safe, nourished — and we should strive to say inspired,” said Cumbo. She said that she wants NYCHA residents to feel proud of where they live, instead of feeling ashamed, and that she wants NYCHA community centers to become educational gateways for residents.
At a recent candidates’ forum, Cumbo proposed filing a class action suit against the federal government for misuse of funds; due to the sequester, NYCHA lost $205 million in federal funding this year.
“A class action lawsuit can be productive in the sense that it’s a way of bundling all those grievances in one lawsuit to change the system, or at least bring attention to it,” Cumbo explained.
The youngest of five, Cumbo grew up in Brooklyn in a labor household; her parents both worked for Off Track Betting. Except for her undergraduate work at Spelman College in Atlanta, Cumbo has lived her entire life in Brooklyn.
While working on her graduate thesis at New York University, Cumbo conceived her idea for MoCADA, which was inspired by her experiences touring art museums in Europe, and seeing how museums like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain were able to revitalize communities. “I saw how I could do that for my community,” Cumbo said.
“It’s important to bring in different experiences and thought processes to government. I think we need more scientists, engineers, teachers, doctors – more types of inclusion in government,” said Cumbo. “It can’t be all political science majors and lawyers.”