“After Princeton SPIA, I joined SandSJ NJ as a senior policy counsel. SandSJ is a Black-faith-rooted organization that works to liberate the Black community throughout New Jersey and transform public policy to uplift people throughout the state. We’re currently working to build a birthing center in Trenton and a few other places throughout New Jersey that are traditionally birthing deserts. We want to ensure that our citizens have a reliable place to safely give birth and have access to maternal health care, good midwives, and doulas. We're in the process of writing legislation and securing funding for midwives to staff the location, provide culturally competent care, and give them stipends to make that transition easier. I'm really invested in my community because it's my hometown, too. I was recently reelected as president of Trenton NAACP, where we deal with issues like environmental justice, civil rights, housing, and lead. I serve as the head of the Trenton Downtown Association, which specifically invests all of its resources into supporting local businesses and getting people downtown. I’m also a local school board member, making sure the curriculum is teaching kids to be global citizens. It's rewarding to know that my community trusts me to the point where they want to put me in a leadership position. The thing that I'm most passionate about is ending poverty, and it shows up in all the ways that I do my work. SPIA really taught me that all of these issues are very interconnected, and you can't necessarily solve any one of them without dealing with all of these problems across the board. It was the first time my eyes were ever really opened up to that idea. Professor Sharkey's urban inequality class was the class that showed me how all of these issues center around the same level of concentrated poverty, and until we really start to work on all of it, we're not doing anything to solve any of it.” Austin Edwards, MPP ’23.