Annissa: “the opportunities Boston offers are not the same to everyone”

By Sabrina Amrane

“Growing up in Dorchester has been a great gift,” Annissa Essaibi George, City Councilor At-large of the city of Boston, tells Dorchester Post.

“I think Dorchester has everything to offer,” she says.

“From one corner to another corner, it’s very diverse and has a huge variety of experiences. I think that’s only gotten more true throughout my lifetime.”

A Polish-Catholic-Tunisian-Muslim mix

Annissa Essaibi George is not only half Polish and half Tunisian, but she also grew up with a Catholic mother and Muslim father.

Annissa is a first generation American. Her father, Ezzeddine, immigrated to the United States from Tunisia in 1972. Her mother, Barbara, was born in a Displaced Persons’ camp in Germany of Polish parents.

“Growing up in an ethnically, culturally, and religiously different household certainly gave me a very different experience than most of my friends, and certainly than most of my neighbors.”

The neighborhood Essaibi George grew up in was, and remains to be, predominantly Irish. The very mediate neighborhood next door to hers, the one she lives in now, has been traditionally ethnically Polish. She calls it the “Polish triangle,” and says it’s not a coincidence her grandparents came to this section of Dorchester.

There’s not the same concentration of Polish now, but there was a considerably sized community back then. There are still Polish markets, restaurants and churches one can find. “It’s still a place the Polish come to for various cultural activities,” Annissa says.

On the other end, “As a Tunisian there was very little growing up. There were few mosques.”

Annissa’s connections to her Tunisian background happened outside of the city. These places included Cambridge, Watertown, Brookline and Newton. “If you wanted halal, you’d go to a kosher shop. There wasn’t many opportunities to get halal, although that has changed a lot now in Boston, not so much Dorchester though, there’s not enough.” There is practically no North African presence in Dorchester, but in the city of Boston as a whole, in the last ten years or so, there has been an increase in immigrants from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.

Essaibi George was raised and is religiously Catholic, although her brother is Muslim. She lived with her mother’s parents who were Catholic and was more exposed to the Polish language seeing her grandparents spoke it. Her father spoke Arabic, but her mother and father spoke a lot of French with each other as they were both fluent. When her paternal extended family came to the States, Tunisian culture, “not so much language, but food for sure,” became very much a part of her upbringing. “I got a really good exposure of both lifestyles and cultures,” she notes.

Although her family did not practice Islam, many of the cultural aspects of the religion was a part of her life. “There wasn’t pork in the house, no alcohol in the house. My dad fasted. But, my dad also celebrated Christmas. My dad passed away two years ago, but I used to always say he was more excited about Christmas than us as kids. He just loved the celebration. I have aunts who celebrated Christmas which is just so funny to me because they are Muslim. It’s fascinating to me how much religion does influence culture and often times we don’t realize that we may be celebrating a religious custom without celebrating the religion specifically.”

Annissa and her husband, Dorchester-native Doug George, are the proud parents of four boys: Douglas, and triplets, Charlie, Kayden and Samir.

Education and career

When Annissa’s father came to the States and started to have children, one thing he put above everything, including religion, was education for his kids. When Annissa was starting in school, the busing crisis was happening in Boston.

“A lot of parents were afraid of busing and afraid of the effect it was having on kids and on the community, the stress it was putting on students going to and from school.”

Her father was okay with sending Annissa and her brother to the local Catholic school. Her and her brother, who were the oldest, went to Catholic grammar school, then to public high school, and eventually off to college.

Annissa graduated from Boston Technical High School, and earned a B.A. in Political Science from Boston University and a Masters degree of Education from University of Massachusetts Boston.

In 2001, Annissa started to taught Economics, Business Management (as part of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship) and Health & Human Services to juniors and seniors at East Boston High School. She also served as the assistant softball coach. Prior to her working as a teacher, she served as the Student Services Liaison for the Boston Private Industry Council, where she connected students with workplace learning opportunities.

Annissa also is the founder and owner of Stitch House in Dorchester. This brick and mortar retail shop sells yarn and fabrics and offers classes in knitting, sewing, quilting and crochet, all hobbies Annissa has enjoyed since childhood. Stitch House is a thriving, small business that attracts customers from the greater Boston area and beyond since 2007.

Annissa has contributed to her community as an active volunteer serving on the Dorchester House Health Center Board of Directors, Dorchester Day Parade Committee, Columbia Point Task Force, as a former Board Member of McCormack Civic Association and former President of Columbia-Savin Hill Civic Association.

“Political power is really important at the local level”

Annissa Essaibi George started to get involved with politics in high school by participating in student government, student council both at her high school and at the City-wide student council, and then eventually statewide student council.

“For me, I realized, at that young age, that political power is really important at the local level, and you can really affect change if you have access to that political power. I thought it was important to grab ahold some of that political power, especially as I got older, and realized that politicians and those in elected office certainly didn’t look like me, certainly didn’t have a similar experience than me. I was very much aware of that, growing up in a white neighborhood with all the elected officials, for the most part, being white Irish-American Catholic men. I was friends with some of them,” Annissa says.

At the first campaign she ever worked at, current Mayor of Boston Marty Walsh was the neighborhood organizer and taught her a lot about campaigning. “But I thought, there should be more women in this, more people with different experiences in politics. Those [moments] were my early seeds of interest in politics.”

At one point of her adolescent life, Essaibi George tells her dad that she wants to get into politics and run for office when she got older.

“He thought and said out loud, with your name, with an Arab name, Annissa Essaibi, you will never win office in this city. For me, that was highly motivating because my dad said I couldn’t do it.” She goes on, “I said, no, actually, I can do it, and worked to prove him wrong.”

As Annissa grew older and was teaching high school in Boston, still politically active and interested in possibly running for office, she thought to herself, “Wow, our local government really doesn’t reflect the residents of the city of Boston. I think it’s okay to have different types of people at the table. Not just gender, not just culture or ethnicity, but experience.”

“Teachers don’t [usually] run for office. With a special in education, I have so much to contribute to the conversation. And, when teachers have political power, they can do some really great things, and I’ve been able to do that my first term, really working to improve our educational system that will eventually lead to greater outcomes for our students.” Annissa is also a parent of four students, three of them being in the Boston public schools. She adds, “For me, it’s really important that that experience gets shared from a policy-making perspective.”

A City Councilor is someone who takes action

Annissa was elected as an At-Large Boston City Council for the first time in November 2015, and then, in November 2017 she was re-elected.

“Since a young age, it’s been that local piece, those at the municipal level that are the closest to the voters, closest to affecting change, and really have the greatest flexibility in making decisions,” George shares on why she ran for City Councilor as a position.

She goes on, “At the higher levels of government, it takes a lot longer, I think, to affect change, and for people to feel the change you want to make.”

Annissa gives an example of how being City Councilor has given her the opportunity to make mediate change. Over the course of the season, she has been working on the issue concerning improperly discarded needles due to the opioid crisis in particular. These needles have been found on the playground, in the streets. They discovered they only had three people responsible for responding to phone calls regarding picking up the needles: policemen, EMT men, and firefighters. This was an inefficient use of their time. Annissa says, “We needed to do something about it. I was able to advocate for, and within a few weeks time, maybe six weeks at the most, getting into the budget and getting approved for more people to do this work.” She adds, “I think at higher levels [of government] it takes too long to make that impact. I really appreciate the ability to act quickly. I describe myself as a potholes and playgrounds kind of politician. I want to get the work done.”

Annissa expresses she simply doesn’t have the desire to spend hours on discussing action. “It’s important to do, to a certain degree, and that I fully embrace, but these endless conversations about policy,” she says, require “some restrictions on how much time we’re going to waste debating the merits.”

“We need to be able to make decisions and we need to be able to make them quickly. I think it’s one of my skill sets being a parent. You’re going to have to be able to measure the pros and cons. You have to be able to outline the steps to get to a certain outcome, and then you have to go for it; especially when we talk about schools, especially when we talk about public safety, especially when we talk about public health risks and concerns, we don’t have time to wait to make changes on how we do things as a city.”

“I think this job, the role of City Councilor, is one where you need someone that’s really about action and very much task-oriented, roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-to-work [type of person], as opposed to pontificating for hours in a session of debate that is so much just about show,” Annissa says.

Challenges as a City Councilor

Annissa tells us that one of the challenges of being City Councilor is having to balance the desires of constituents who call into the office for assistance with other ongoing work. She also says, “There’s sometimes problems that I can’t fix. And that’s incredibly frustrating. Sometimes the answer isn’t always ready-for.”

An example she gives is recovery from addiction. “We’ve got two fronts that we’re working on, we’ve got the clinical crisis with addiction, but we also have the impacts of addiction on our city, those who are suffering from addiction, their family, their loved ones, but also people that live in the city, work in the city, who have to face the challenges that addiction brings. We can respond to some of the symptoms, but I can’t do some of that clinical work. Getting things done on both fronts is difficult. We all want to fix this crisis. There are certain things, when I think about addiction, that will persist forever. I hope that there is a day where we cure addiction, but I’m also very practical and realize we never will. When we work on addiction as a society, there will be something else on the other end, but how do we mitigate addiction so that it impacts the fewest people and we then can aid those few people? Right now, it’s a burn for everybody, a challenge for everybody, and especially those in active addiction. It’s a desperate situation. Their next high could be their death. We have to act quicker. And we can’t always do it.”

The opportunities Boston offers are not the same to everyone

“Unfortunately, not everyone has the same opportunities that I’ve had. I think it’s a combination of hard work, for sure, getting to this point in my career, I attribute it to my own hard work, certainly my parents and my upbringing, the restrictions they put on me I didn’t appreciate then, the importance of education to my parents and how that was shared with me, with being able to attend the greatest schools the city has to offer, from lower grades to college. I went to Boston University, which is one of the greatest universities, but I gotta go there because my dad worked there.” Because of this advantage, Annissa attended Boston University for free, “Whether I would’ve been able to afford it if my dad didn’t work there, I don’t know.”

Annissa Essaibi George mentions how not every kid gets to go to a good elementary or high school.

“Not every kid has that opportunity unfortunately, and that’s something I work on every single day.”

She says, “There’s a little bit of luck too. People say luck doesn’t exist, that it’s proper planning. Yeah, it’s proper planning that meets opportunity. That’s what creates luck. And not every kid has the same experience in the classroom which could set them on the wrong course for the future. I’d like to think in an ideal world, if we were able to remove all the barriers our young people face, everyone has equal opportunity, but those barriers exist. And my job as an elected official is to remove all of those barriers, to work towards removing as many as I can while I have the opportunity to do it.”

In Dorchester we need to eliminate low-performing schools

“We’ve got a lot of great things that are happening in Dorchester. We have some incredible schools, we’re close to public transportation. The red line cuts through Dorchester, we’ve got bus service, trolley service. That’s good for Dorchester, it gives our residents greater access to jobs in the city. We’re close to main thoroughfares, close to East Boston, the airport, so it creates a lot of economic opportunity. But because of all those things, the cost of housing is so much higher. So if you don’t have the benefit of one of those great jobs or a higher income, you may not be able to live here. We also, in parts of our neighborhood, have some significant safety concerns. Violence still exists in a very real way. And granted violence overall is down, violence still exists in our community.”

Annissa talks about the forms of violence that still occupy certain parts of the neighborhood, “shootings, stabbings, but we also still have residents facing domestic violence, experiencing trauma, the fear of violence which is so paralyzing.”

Violence isn’t the only challenge. Essaibi adds, “We still have schools that aren’t high quality within Dorchester. What we need in Dorchester, what we need in every neighborhood of Boston because I represent the whole city, is to minimize the problems we have in our neighborhood, to limit, or eliminate, the ultimate goal, low-performing schools. How do we make them high quality schools so every kid in Dorchester has access to a high quality school?”

Essaibi George continues with more questions, “How do we drive down the cost of housing so residents don’t feel pushed out? How do we create more economic opportunities so people’s incomes can rise, so they can continue to live in this neighborhood and access opportunities for themselves and for their families?” She goes on, “I’d also say with the rise of cost of housing, it does become also more difficult for locally owned businesses to exist in Dorchester. How do we work to make sure businesses don’t get pushed out? Businesses, for my entire life, have made each sub-section of Dorchester unique and special from another sub-section of Dorchester.”

Future of Dorchester and Boston

“I would like Dorchester not to change too much. I’d like to remove some of those negatives I listed. I want in 2030 for all of our schools to be high-performing, I want our transportation system and our infrastructure to be in check. I think we will see by 2030 a lot fewer people driving cars, and hopefully more people either on bicycles, walking or taking the T. I think we can get there.”

Annissa Essaibi George concludes her wishes, “I’d like to see more families in Dorchester and I know my neighborhood where I grew up there are a lot less kids. That’s because families are having fewer children, but families have also moved out of the city. I’d like to see more families return to Dorchester to raise their families with more kids on the streets. That’s what I envision for 2030.”