Growing up in Detroit, before it was the country’s “comeback kid,” meant growing up in a community that was underserved and underprivileged. Management senior and Detroit native Myya Jones lived all over the city—from east Detroit, to west, to downtown and southside—and now she’s ready to go back.
On Jan. 1, Jones submitted her bid for mayor of Detroit. To get her name on the ballot, Jones must collect 500 to 1,000 valid signatures by April 25, or approximately 1 percent of the total votes from the last race, she said.
“Taking action, instilling hope, inspiring change” is her campaign slogan, and it’s what she envisions for the future of Detroit.
“I used to think that politics was for older people, so you never really see younger people actually running for office or being the face of a state or a city,” Jones said. “But what you also don’t see is that people who are on the Hill, who write policy, who are actually doing all the research and everything, are young people.”
Bringing a millennial’s perspective to the mayoral office in Detroit is just one of the many attributes Jones hopes to bring to such a position. When it comes down to the makeup of political government, she wants to see diversity in age as well as diversity in race and sexual orientation.
“Too many older people put us down, tell us we’re too young, we’re too unexperienced, but we’ve been in college, we’ve had internships, we’ve had jobs, we have community service, we’ve done student orgs, we’ve done all these things but we’re still not qualified enough,” Jones said. “So what do we have to do besides go sit in a desk in an office and sit there for seven hours from (9 a.m. to 5 p.m). to prove that we’re eligible to do something?”
Besides her age, another thing Jones believes sets her apart from other potential candidates is that she was born and raised in Detroit and has had experiences that are typical of a Detroit resident.
“I have the experience of ... something that’s common for Detroiters to go through as far as, like, me being sexually abused, me not having my father in my life for most of the time, having family members that passed away,” she said. “Being someone who has experienced these things, I know, OK, this is what I needed when I was here in Detroit and I was underserved and I was underprivileged, so I’m going to go out and make sure and ask questions as well to see if these are the same issues that we’re still having in Detroit.”
Her platform is focused on improving education, normalizing mental health and building better community engagement with the police.
For education, she hopes to ensure students have extracurricular and recreational activities, programs where students can exercise their creativity.
“Making sure they have access to these things, making sure these things are affordable for them, if not affordable, free for them,” Jones said. “We don’t really have playgrounds or parks in Detroit. We need to have more playgrounds and things to where students can actually do dual enrollment or vocational school, things like that.”
Jones wants to bring about more mental health awareness and normalize it, starting with schools.
She hopes to ensure children know how to cope with situations going on in the city, she said.
“It is hard growing up in a city that’s underserved and people don’t really look to make sure the communities are taken care of, so we need to make sure people’s mental health is taken care of,” Jones said.
She also wants to build a trust between the police and the rest of the community in an effort to lower the overall crime rate.
“I want to make sure that our police force is actually working with the people and that the people feel comfortable enough to work with the police,” she said.
Even with her big plans, Jones has to work to balance everything she’s involved in.
“People always ask me all the time how I balance everything I do because I’m very active in the community, but a lot of the stuff that I do is things that I am passionate about and it is fun for me,” she said. “Everything kind of ties together in my life to where I’m able to balance everything, and of course you have to make sure you’re not wasting time and utilizing every minute of every day to make sure you’re getting things done.”
Jones said now is the time to make sure people are keeping hope and looking toward the future with that same hope, and that’s a core component of her campaign.
“I’m very active in civic engagement,” she said. “It’s what I’ve always been passionate about, so this career choice for me is not too far fetched from what I’m used to doing, because I believe that political engagement is political engagement and social action. It’s nothing more, nothing less. You have to be about the people, you have to be for the people.”
