Karen Jarrett, NYCLU’s brand new director of field organizing, learned the power of the people early on. She was a young single mother in the late nineties, working at a nonprofit in her native Newark, New Jersey, when she was fired for union organizing. The nonprofit, in fiscal disarray, stopped issuing paychecks. She could’ve slunked quietly away—but instead she and her colleagues organized a lunchtime picket outside the office and blanketed the area with leaflets saying that the nonprofit, a community mainstay, didn’t pay its staff.

“My ex-boss was so embarrassed, she called me asking me to come back,” says the warm Jarrett. “She begged, ‘Just make the protests stop!’ Right then, I understood the power of collective action and mobilization. We shifted power from her to us. For me, it was like a lightbulb turning on and it never shut off.”

And hence a career was born. Jarrett went on to work for the local chapter of the Communications Workers of America union first as a shop steward and eventually as an elected vice president. After nearly ten years she moved on to healthcare unions joining fights to save hospitals and services before joining the New York State Nurses Association at a time when the union was branching out from protecting its members’ benefits into broader issues of patient equity in healthcare—and into training its own members to run for office on healthcare issues. “Extending and deepening our work by engaging in coalitions with other organizations made sense to us not just from a union but a community perspective,” she says. “We ran the gamut of community engagement from marching in parades to engaging with communities around social justice issues. Every space we joined or created, communities and impacted people were happy to see that the nurses cared and were engaged.”

One of her proudest moments at NYSNA was working on a campaign to prevent the privatization of chronic dialysis care. Private vendors were a few years deep into wresting away chronic dialysis care away from the public hospital system, whose services boasted high rates of survival. “Officials told us they couldn’t afford to keep the services,” she recalls, “and we said, ‘You can’t afford to keep people alive? ’ Privatization would take the services away from hospitals in the city’s poorest areas. So, we organized patients, labor and advocacy groups, researched and published a white paper, mobilized impacted communities, lobbied city and state legislators—and then we won.” The vendor’s service could not stand up to the scrutiny. “I’m proud of that campaign because the union did not have to go beyond protecting their members, but they did. Those vital, life affirming services remain in the public health domain, where they belong.”

Now at NYCLU, Jarrett says she hopes to continue to “deepen our community engagement and relationships in a meaningful way. NYCLU is well known as a litigation partner, but I want to further help it be viewed as a strategic campaign partner” on issues where we can be of service to impacted communities including defunding the police, racial justice, and immigrants’ rights.

Meanwhile, Jarrett, who recently moved back to Newark after years in nearby suburbs “because I have a deep and abiding love for the place where I was born and raised,” is riding out COVID as best she can. “Normally, I’d be traveling to see my sons a lot”—Khari, 25, is in grad school in New Hampshire, and Khashari, 23, is outside Dallas—“and I’d be observing elections in South America,” something she’s done often in recent years because “it’s satisfying to see life outside our country—and because I love arepas, which I discovered in Venezuela.”

But instead she’ll continue to do fix-up jobs on her new home. “Before COVID, I was living out of boxes, but now I’ve been repainting and caulking tiles,” she says. “Home improvement and organizing are alike in that they both require focus, and no project is ever as easy as you think. That’s why I don’t sweat the small stuff. You can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”