Senator Valerie Foushee is Ready to Take Her Career in Service All the Way to Congress
After serving five terms in the NC General Assembly, Senator Valerie Foushee announced last November that she is running to represent North Carolina’s 6th Congressional District. Source: Valerie Foushee for Congress
With over 24 years of public service under her belt, Senator Valerie Foushee is ready to take her fight to Congress. Shortly after Rep. David Price (NC-04) announced his retirement in November of 2021, Senator Foushee emerged as an obvious challenger to represent residents of Orange and Durham County. As a lifelong resident of Chapel Hill, Sen. Foushee has a long record of serving her local community, starting from her work as a school board member all the way to her five terms in the NC General Assembly.
Sen. Foushee’s start in public service stemmed from her desire to advocate for children of color within the Orange County public school system. For her, this remains an important legislative priority and one that she will bring to Congress. “I’ve always felt that education is the great equalizer. It is the leveler,” said the senator. To continue supporting young North Carolinians, Foushee supports universal Pre-K and expanded funding for public education. “I’ve always felt that a student's zip code or their parent’s income should not dictate the quality of their education,” she stated, “Certainly education did it for me. I grew up in a very poor family and my parents always told us what the promise of education was, and I have found, like many other things they’ve told me, they were correct.”
Her work is not limited to secondary education reform. Sen. Foushee is also ready to push for equality in higher education, specifically when it comes to the student debt crisis. “I will fight for free community college and debt free college.” For Sen. Foushee, the student debt crisis not only represents a failure to young people that leave school saddled with massive amounts of debt, but she understands that it is a product of racial and gender barriers. “When we think about those affected by student debt, we know that women carry two-thirds of student loan debt. And Black women carry about two percent more than white women,” she explained.
Pushing for equity in education is only one of the many areas where Sen. Foushee will apply her experience in DC. She has also made criminal justice reform a priority for her campaign. As a retired administrator from the Chapel Hill Police Department, where she worked for 21 years, Fosuhee has first hand understanding of where changes can and should be made. “I worked on policies that ensure the safety of our citizens and held our officers accountable and trained them well.” Foushee believes that passing legislative reforms to hold officers accountable is beneficial to everyone. “You do that by ensuring proper training, you do that by holding [police officers] accountable and you do that by enacting policies that will ensure that citizens are treated with respect.” During her time with the Chapel Hill Police Department, the administration implemented one of the first social work offices within a police department in the country, which she sees as invaluable to ensuring that police will better serve their communities. Beyond working with police forces, Foushee wants broader reform to dismantle the systemic racism embedded within the US justice system, including the passage of the George Floyd Act, ending gun violence, terminating cash bail, and pushing for marijuana justice legislation.
Though Sen. Foushee is firm in her stance on progressive policies, she is still gearing up for what is shaping up to be a competitive primary race. She believes that her campaign is exceptional because of how deeply her history of service is into the local community. This began when she helped start the first shelter for women and children in Chapel Hill. Through working with local families at the shelter and learning where to allocate resources within the county government, she gained deep connections with community members who benefited from the results of her work. “Understanding where the needs are [in your community] and how the government serves to help in those situations is a gift for me to be able to give back to the community,” the senator explained, “To make connections between people and services: that’s what I’ve been able to do between these different levels of government.”
Armed with an agenda and experience, Sen. Foushee has no doubts that she is ready for the halls of Congress: “[Service] is a calling for me.” Though education and criminal justice reforms remain key elements to her campaign, she is also a strong advocate for voting rights protection, supporting women’s reproductive health rights, and expanding civil rights across the board. Sen. Foushee currently has over thirty endorsements, many of which include her colleagues from the NC House and Senate and a number of local officials. To learn more about her congressional campaign, readers can visit her website.