Our endorsement for Seattle City Council District 5 is Nilu Jenks! Among the candidates, Jenks stood out in part because of her comprehensive and nuanced platform to tackle the wide array of problems residents in the district face, including affordable housing, surveillance, immigration, and expanding the city’s LGBTQIA+ resources. 

Jenks is a first-generation Iranian American, born in Oklahoma to undocumented parents who arrived in the US to escape the 1979 revolution there. As her parents became naturalized through Reagan’s 1986 immigration amnesty program (yes, Republicans used to treat immigrants like people — crazy!), Jenks began to develop her political conscience from a young age. Now the political and partnerships director at FairVote Washington, Jenks is once again looking to bring her life and political experience to the Seattle City Council. 

Jenks cites the 2018 Parkland shooting as a major turning point for her political involvement. Living in California at the time, she helped implement the nation’s largest gun buy-back program and even organized against gun store openings. Then, in 2019, she moved back to Washington state, where she became a strong advocate for ranked-choice voting. In 2022, Seattle voters approved Proposition 1B, which will see RCV instituted in next year’s primaries. For the candidate, improving election outcomes and voter participation through RCV is a vital step toward fixing the city’s problems, in addition to helping restore people’s faith in the democratic process, like other US cities have done, such as Minneapolis and New York City. 

As a District 5 resident living in the Lake City neighborhood, Jenks believes conversations around supporting immigrants and other marginalized communities in Seattle have neglected her district, because often people have wrongly thought, as she puts it, “It doesn’t look good to give money to the North End.” 

For Jenks, this couldn’t be further from the truth, as her district, spanning the northern end of Seattle from Aurora Avenue to Northgate, has been home to a growing number of the city’s immigrant and working-class populations (with Lake City now harboring its most diverse preschool). 

She said that everyday she sees the impacts of divestment in her community. As the advocacy chair at John Rogers Elementary, she had a student recently tell her, “We don’t eat dinner in our family.” More evidence: Aurora is currently the second largest location for juvenile sex trafficking in the nation. 

If elected, Jenks intends to build a more unified identity for the district by instituting policies that strengthen community relations. That would include: supporting Seattle’s social housing developer to build more units; ending CCTV surveillance; creating a community theater/arts space in Lake City; addressing food deserts by expanding the Lake City farmers market and establishing a municipal grocery store; and developing the Aurora corridor. 

In terms of supporting the city’s LGBTQIA+ community, Jenks is keen on creating a dedicated shelter for Queer homeless youth and providing more money to Seattle’s LGBTQ Commission. 

But overall, what really won us over was Jenks’s framing of all these issues as an intersectional refugee crisis that needs to be addressed: 

“I'm seeing climate refugees, immigrant refugees, Queer refugees coming here,” she said. Her ability to relate these seemingly disparate experiences together and compose a comprehensive strategy demonstrates to us that she has a lot of empathy, and shows the signs of a candidate who truly cares about their neighbors and city. 

Vote Jenks.