St. Thomas ‘08 alumna Erin Maye Quade turned her passion for her community into power.

Maye Quade of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party was elected on Nov. 8 to represent Apple Valley, Minnesota, state House District 57A, over Ali Jimenez-Hopper after the Republican incumbent Tara Mack declined to run for another term.

Maye Quade decided to run for office due to a 380 percent increase in poverty at her childhood elementary school. Not hearing about it from legislators drove Maye Quade to do something about it herself.

“I had initially planned to partner with an organization called the Sheridan Story, which partners up with the schools that experience this hunger gap,” Maye Quade said. “I was like, well, I’ll run for office and be in the system and be the voice for those kids.”

After the initial spark, Maye Quade said she experienced many moments while door knocking to promote her campaign that kept the kindling on the fire.

“There’s someone who said, ‘Oh, my daughters really look up to you, and they have never seen anyone who looks like them in power,’ or ‘No one has ever knocked on my door and asked me what I cared about before;’ so those kind of things — they keep you going,” Maye Quade said.

Born and raised in Apple Valley herself, Maye Quade was focused on making her campaign localized and talking to the community to address issues in the community.

“I knocked doors everyday, and so my experience in this political cycle is different than others because I was really just focused on the community,” Maye Quade said.

She used door knocking to get the people of the community’s stories and better understand how the policies are affecting people.

“I’m not an expert on all things. I spent a lot of time saying, ‘I don’t know a lot about that. Tell me what you know and share that with me,’ because people are policy experts. They live policies everyday,” Maye Quade said.

Maye Quade faced various obstacles on her path to victory such as kidney stones just weeks before the election. She also had to balance campaign work with her full-time job as a community representative for Rep. Keith Ellison.

“I am a young, gay black woman from the suburbs; like, there is not a lot of money in my circles. And so I really had to network, and we really raised money,” Maye Quade said.

At 30 years old, Maye Quade often found herself answering the question ‘How old are you?’ as few young people work as state representatives. Indeed, fewer than 5 percent of all of the state legislators are millennial women.

“Our voices are absolutely missing from the table, and if you are not at the table, you are on the menu,” Maye Quade said.

“It was really energizing to bring a lot of other millennial people into this work. Some people got engaged in politics for the first time because of my candidacy,” she added.

Maye Quade said St. Thomas taught her fundamental life lessons which she took to her campaign and now will take to office. It is at St. Thomas where Maye Quade learned how the government works and how to interact and build relationships with people who do not share the same political views. While attending St. Thomas, Maye Quade even met her mentor, Erin Murphy, the current state House representative for the university’s district, for the first time.

“St. Thomas was the pivotal moment in my life,” Maye Quade said. “It was the four years that set me on this path.”

Maye Quade said throughout the campaign she kept rooted to the idea that ‘“people respond to authenticity more than they respond to carefully crafted people.”

“I didn’t do this to get a power grab; I didn’t do this because I think my voice sounds great when I speak; I didn’t do this because I think the world of myself; I did this because I thought I would make a good representative,” Maye Quade said.

For a while, Maye Quade has lived her life taking it one step at a time and not looking too far into the future. Right now this is her only life plan.

“I want to focus on being a good representative rather than (thinking about) running for a future office because everything gets tempered by an office you may be seeking later,” Maye Quade said. “This is the one I have; this is the one I will focus on for awhile.”

Lydia Lockwood can be reached at lock0052@stthomas.edu