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Cambridge City Councilor Alanna M. Mallon is running for re-election following her first term in office on a platform that features housing affordability and providing support for Cambridge families.
As a councilor, Mallon has worked to pass initiatives to provide more opportunities for Cambridge residents to join the workforce and address concerns of food and housing insecurity, she said in an interview last week.
“I wanted to make sure that as a city we were directing our vast resources to our most vulnerable in our community because to me that’s a critical need,” Mallon said. “If you want a healthy community, you have to have healthy kids and families.”
During her time in office, Mallon worked to revitalize a police department cadet program, which allows kids to be employed and mentored by members of the Cambridge Police Department. She also cited her collaboration with MIT and the Metro Building Trade Council to bring Building Pathways — a six week pre-apprenticeship program for the building trades — to Cambridge.
Mallon said that, moving forward, she hopes to continue her work on housing, which she views to be a key issue. She said she is concerned about the availability of low-income housing and the rate at which renters are being displaced.
“I think the issue of housing is the defining issue of our time right now — not just affordable housing for our low income residents but for our middle income residents and our renters,” Mallon said.
In the past, Mallon has worked with city administrators to keep tenants in place in Cambridge.
“The city has been doing a really good job of, with the City Council, figuring out where we can direct our funding most urgently to protect affordable units and decrease the eviction rate,” Mallon said.
Prior to her time on the City Council, Mallon worked as a clothing designer before turning her focus to non-profit work.
Mallon founded the Cambridge Weekend Backpack Program during the 2012-2013 school year to improve food security for Cambridge students by sending food home on weekends with those who relied on school meals during the week. Her work with the Backpack Program led her to serve as the city’s education liaison for former Cambridge Mayor David P. Maher.
Mallon said her non-profit work inspired her campaign for City Council.
“I ran in 2017 because I thought I could pack backpacks full of food for the rest of my life, or I could run for office and work on those underlying issues of why kids are hungry,” she said.
Mallon currently works for Food For Free, a non-profit organization that delivers healthy meals to vulnerable populations in Cambridge and Boston.
Ryan Lee, the operations director for Food For Free, said Mallon’s work with the organization is emblematic of her prior service to Cambridge.
“It’s an extension of what she’s been doing in Cambridge for a long time,” Lee said. “She’s always been out there listening to folks in Cambridge. Before they were her neighbors, and now they’re her constituents.”
Mallon said that her greatest strength lies in her willingness to do “painstaking” work to solve difficult issues for Cambridge residents.
“We don’t need more people on Monday nights who are just creating policy orders for big stories,” she said. “We need people who are going to be doing that work behind the scenes and bringing people together, and I do that.”
