Last Call

Etel Haxhiaj Woman of Consequence

On Aug. 27, the City of Worcester’s Advisory Committee on the Status of Women will celebrate Etel Haxhiaj as 2020’s Woman of Consequence. Haxhiaj was selected as this year’s recipient of the prestigious award based on her strong leadership and pivotal work as a change agent across the community. The ceremony will begin streaming on

Facebook at 6 p.m. and feature a keynote address by Boston At-Large City Councilor Julia Mejia and a reading from Worcester Youth Poet Laureate

Amina Mohammed. In addition, Safiya Nafai will be recognized as this year’s Young Woman of

Consequence.

You’ve spoken quite a bit about your experience as a new American. Would you be willing to share the story of your parents fleeing their native Albania because of civil and political unrest?

The story of myself and my parents is not that different than a lot of families who have escaped political and civil unrest in their home countries. We were forced to leave in 1997. I was 17 years old. We fled to neighboring Greece where we lived undocumented for two years before making our way to the United

States. My parents chose to leave because they were worried about my safety as a young woman. There was a lot of trafficking of women and girls happening at the time. They made the very difficult choice of uprooting our lives in search of safety and better economic outcomes for themselves and for me.

When you arrived in Worcester, how did you pursue an education and what has your career trajectory looked like?

I arrived here because of Clark University. I studied international development and social change as an undergrad, and community development and planning for my master’s degree. In the 22 years that I’ve been in the city, my career and my vocational trajectory has focused on serving our community. I’ve been a youth mentor. I’ve run conflict resolution and peer mediation programs for young people in our schools. I have worked as a mediator in the Attorney General’s office making sure that our elders and our consumers were protected from scams and keeping an eye on patterns of abuse across Worcester’s consumer field. I’ve worked with the homeless population. I currently work for Central Mass Housing Alliance as a director of public advocacy and education. I have also done a lot of community organizing, most recently, supporting Mothers Out Front. We fight climate change and try to bring about local and state policies that bring us closer to a hundred percent renewable energy through a just transition. I’ve also volunteered for the YWCA Board of Directors where I currently serve and have been involved in different community efforts regarding racial justice and issues impacting families.

Congratulations on your recognition as this year’s Woman of Consequence. What do you think renders you uniquely qualified as a recipient?

Well, when you have really good women friends in your life who support you and cheer for you and are there for you at times like this, you end up being nominated for some of these awards. I was nominated by Robyn Kennedy, who was one of my campaign managers during my run for office last year. She is also a really good friend of mine. The nomination was supported by a lot of community members who I’ve had the privilege of organizing and working with. It’s really exciting. I want to say that as I sit here and think about what it means to me, I feel there are so many women of consequence and girls of consequence in our community that I personally know, supported, mentored, and look up to. I just feel very blessed to have them in my life. I definitely want to share this award with every single one of them.

What does the future look like for you?

The future won’t look much different in terms of my commitment to continuing to lift up issues that affect women, girls, women of color, the LGBTQIA community, and personally supporting women and girls who are doing amazing work that needs to be spotlighted.

If you had secured a position on City Council, what would be your top priority right now?

That’s a really good question. During the election, I spoke a lot about issues that I feel are often not discussed through an equity lens. Obviously, one of the things that is really important to me — not only because of the daily work that I do, but also because it’s one of the critical needs — is the demand for affordable housing opportunities for families as well as individuals who are on the margins of the housing crisis. We cannot divorce the climate crisis from the housing crisis. We know that there are intersections between those two. Generally speaking, I think every policy that I would have advocated for or supported, would have centered racial equality.

What would you like to say to the women of Worcester?

As a woman who ran for office, one of the things that was really surprising to me and that hurt during the election was that some folks still think, including male candidates, that a single mother couldn’t do the job of city councilor. It is really hard, as a female candidate, and as a mother running for office, to watch how hard all of the mothers in the race worked with access to fewer resources. When we talk about the status of women, it’s just disheartening to see that out of the one hundred highest-paid municipal employees in Worcester, only three happened to be women, and they’re all white women. There’s no Black or brown or indigenous women represented.