Just over a century ago, 107 years this month, my great grandmother Antonietta, immigrated to this neighborhood. Had there been a quota on immigrants from Italy at the time, she would have been far above it. She came with an uncle; today she’d be called a chain migrant. Under today’s laws, most of the Italian immigrants who came to this neighborhood would be derided as “illegal immigrants”. They came from what was then a shithole country.

They came to a place whose promises were not always met by its actions. As they worked, they suffered. But there was a basic deal. Work hard, play by the rules. You’ll get ahead, and your children will have a chance at a better life. That deal wasn’t open to everyone. But it was there, to grow.

And on both sides of my family, it seemed true. Both of my grandfathers had successful small businesses in this neighborhood — a body shop and a pharmacy. But today, they’re both the same brand of chain dollar store.

When I used to walk home from school down Academy Avenue, the future seemed limitless. Then, in the first signs of what was about to come, the economy fell out beneath our feet. My dad’s small business went under. It wasn’t his fault, but it quickly became his problem. I watched the hardest working person I know see years of hard work fall apart because of forces completely outside of his control.

Like many, we moved to Florida. It ripped at the fabric of our family and it made me angry. While a few remained unscathed, for a lot of our friends and family, like many Rhode Islanders, it was worse.

But this has been our story for decades now. Those at the very top do better and better, and the rest of us have to work harder and harder, all for the privilege of never getting ahead.

Today, the deck is so stacked against people trying to work their way into the middle class, that the entire system feels like a sick joke. The smartest and most talented kids I went to school with all left Rhode Island and are contributing their skills to other places. Those who stayed still see less opportunity, stagnant wages, and bills that just get bigger and bigger.

A few years ago, I moved home. And I’ve been trying to take the lessons I’ve learned so far in my life to build Rhode Island back up. Because I love this place, and I love our people, and we’ve suffered for too long.

Now, I learned pretty early on that there’s nowhere quite like Rhode Island. That has been reinforced everywhere I’ve ever been.

But when we left Rhode Island, I learned tough lessons about the global economy first hand; and saw how changes in technology and trade make their way into the lives of everyday, working people. We can’t forget that we’re competing not just with our neighbors, but the whole world — and we need to think big if we’re going to thrive.

From my big Italian family, I learned the importance of hard work, and the how important it is for immigrants to continually breath new life into our state. Our highest calling is to protect the rights of everyone in our state. Especially when they don’t look like us. Or sound like us. We need to remember the prejudices and hardships we faced, and that have passed because after a generation or two we were able to look enough like the people in power to get by, and we must do better for the newest among us.

At Florida International University, I was in the 15% of students who were white, and most were first generation Americans. And despite my own challenges with a society that didn’t accept who I was, I learned how ignorant I had been to so much, and I learned first hand that all anyone needs in life to get ahead is a fair fight and someone to believe in them.

But today in Rhode Island, the game isn’t fair for almost anyone and our most vulnerable communities don’t have the resources they need to get ahead. We need to assure that every community in our state, especially the most vulnerable, have the tools and support they need to break the city of poverty and end systemic racism once and for all.

At a tech startup, I learned what it takes for a business to get off the ground, and how important learning from failure is. We need to make it easier for entrepreneurs to start and run small business and create good jobs here in Rhode Island.

Working the overnight shift at a luxury hotel, I learned how hard so many work for so little. We need to stand up for working families in Rhode Island — we need to raise the minimum wage to be in line with what it would be if it were just tied to inflation from the beginning. But we also need to make sure there is a very wide path to higher paying jobs to everyone in our state. We have a long way to go on healthcare. We need to make it easier for working moms to afford childcare and ensure that when they get older, their kids go to schools that will unlock every ounce of their potential. No matter what zip-code they grow up in.

By what had to be some kind of clerical error, I was let into the London School of Economics. There I learned how important being connected to the rest of the world is; and I learned how the example of our democracy took a continent ravaged by war and built peace, and inspired billions to forge their own destiny. We can never lose sight of how important it is for our democracy to work and though it comes with many rights, citizenship, more importantly, comes with enormous responsibilities. We have to remember that progress always involves sacrifice. We need to hold on to our values, big ideas and our grand story. We need them now more than ever.

And when I came back home to Rhode Island, I was reminded of so much I already knew. We have so much potential. We’re the best place in the world to live. And we’ve been failed by a government that’s been of and by and for the insiders for too long.

Now I’ve been around the political establishment just long enough to know it needs a lot of new blood. But I’ve also had the opportunity to go to work every day to try and build our state back up.

I’ve worked with our manufacturers to sow the seeds of a new industrial revolution. I’ve worked to expand skills training and career and tech education because not everyone needs a four year degree to get a good job. And I’ve worked with TF Green Airport to bring the first year round service to Europe to our state in history– and at the cheapest prices ever offered, our small businesses now have access to global markets for their products and services. I’ve worked to expand investment in affordable housing, and to unleash the power of our universities to create new jobs and build the Rhode Island of tomorrow.

Now, these things are important. But we have so much work to do. And if you send me to the State House then I will continue fighting for a Rhode Island that works for every single one of us, not just the well off and the well connected.

I’m not running against anyone or anything. I’m running for our future.

We’re in a divided and sometimes very mean time in our politics right now. At times we have all be guilty of making it worse. And there is an easy tendency to simply run around trying to “resist the Trump agenda”, as if that was a thing that doesn’t change every time the guy has indigestion, and as if that was what’s at the heart of our own community’s problems. We have too many politicians who try and lord their own intellectual superiority over everyone else, and infect our politics with the kind of divisive name-calling and arrogance that has destroyed our federal government.

Beware of anyone who tells you they’re running for the state legislature to stop Donald Trump from doing anything. Cause all you’re going to get is someone who’s out to make silly promises, get themselves in the newspaper, and achieve absolutely nothing to make our home a better place.

I believe you lead by humility and with action, not arrogance and exclamation. And that you can take the time to listen to the people you’re asking to represent, or you can lecture them.

This is not a campaign about who should have been the Democratic nominee for president in 2016 and this is not a campaign about Donald Trump.

Now that’s not the say that I am not appalled by the behavior of our president, the damage he’s done to our democracy, or the fear he has instilled over and over again in the most vulnerable groups in our society and the fear and anger he has manipulated among others. I am. But fear and anger have never build anything that lasts, and running on them is not enough.

Because this is a campaign about us.

This is a campaign about what can happen when we leave old fears and prejudices behind and come together to make a better Rhode Island for our kids.

I’m running to build up the community that made me who I am, that has given so much to my family, and which I am in the lucky and privileged position to be able to contribute back to, and to turn around, take the hand of a little boy in Olneyville wondering why he’s not all that excited to chase after girls with his friends, or a little girl on Fallon Avenue, where my grandparents had their first house, who came to Rhode Island as a refugee from Congo, to escape war and find peace, and pull them along into a better future with us.

Now I get that this is not how a lot of people are approaching politics today, and it may not be to every voters liking, and that’s OK. Some people just want firebrands who promise the world. But the promise that I made to myself when I started this campaign was that I was going to campaign as me — a son of Rhode Island, who’s made mistakes and learned a lot and believes that our best days are ahead of us, and that far more unites us than divides us. I know in my heart that we can do this. Even today. Even in the toxic climate we find ourselves in today, we will never build a strong society until we can look each other in the eye and see in each other, ourselves.

If I make one promise to the people in my district, it’s that I will first and foremost be a senator who listens. I will be a senator who is here, in your living rooms and in your churches, at the neighborhood bar, and in the dog park, (mostly just trying to pet your dog).

I will be your champion in the State House. Because in this district is all the diversity and promise of Rhode Island.

In this restaurant, like so many on these streets, we’re reminded of the struggle of immigrants past and we can dedicate ourselves to making the path a little straighter for immigrants present.

From Ebenezer Baptist Church just on the other side of the Armory, we must see the struggles of black Rhode Islanders as the struggles of all of us.

In Sproutel, a startup in Olneyville that develops toys for kids on the autism spectrum, we see that we too have the ability to be the birthplace of new companies that can create new jobs and solve important problems.

In my neighbor, Mrs. Garcia, who cleans houses for a living, we see that all work has dignity.

In Riffraff Bookstore, we see a couple of entrepreneurs at the forefront of an economic transformation that is reinventing what a mom-and-pop business can be in the digital age.

The artists and actors who are our neighbors show us the vitality of our culture, declare the unvarnished truth and remind us that there are no limits to what we can create — my neighbor Joe Wilson, Jr. couldn’t be here tonight because he’s opening on Broadway as Denzel Washington’s understudy, and today there is a little girl in a drama class at Central High School who may follow Viola Davis onto the red carpet.

I’m running to be her senator. I’m running to build a Rhode Island where she can look in the mirror, look at herself and say, I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and I can be whoever I want to be. I’m running for the kids who show up at YouthPride on Westminster Street every week wondering if the fact that they’re gay or lesbian or trans means they’ll have to settle for less in this life.

I’m running for State Senate because no kid growing up in Rhode Island should have their lives upended due to of a lack of opportunity in our state like happened to me. That’s what this is all about.

We have to make the game fair for all our families — to ensure that healthcare and higher education are the guarantees of the richest society this planet has ever known, not a privilege for the few, to raise wages for working Rhode Islanders and lower the tax burden on low-income and middle class families; to create good, new jobs that will bring my friends, your sons and daughters, your grandchildren, back to Rhode Island.

I’m running to rebuild our public schools, confront our housing crisis and build new infrastructure for a new century, to protect a woman’s right to choose and keep guns off our streets and our of our schools, to protect our environment and see that Rhode Island is an epicentre of the clean energy revolution that is coming. That must come.

I’m running because in the face of cynicism, we must sow trust.

In the face of hatred, we must sow love.

In the face of division, we must unite.

In the face of the small minded repetition of tired slogans and easy shots, we can come together as one community, to build a Rhode Island Antonietta once dreamed of in steerage aboard the Patria as it sailed the Atlantic Ocean 107 years ago.

A lot has changed since then. But when I do my shopping along the same streets today that she’d have done hers, I see dozens of houses flying the rainbow flag. Those flags represent the same hope for freedom and opportunity that she sought then. They represent the social justice we must continually demand, that makes up the core of who we are as Rhode Islanders. They represent the struggle and the pain and the work that it takes to pull the American Dream down from its pedestal and into action.

Because from Rhode Island came the first declarations of independence, of pioneers who declared that we would chart our own course and that our republic would create a new world, leaving behind the fears and suspicions of the old.

From Rhode Island, the technological progress that created the American middle class first found a home and as it spread, the Industrial Revolution that started here, transformed this country, and with it the world.

But the answers we most desperately need aren’t to be found in the past, or by going back to some mythical place that has never been. They’re to be found in the future — and in our joining hands and building it ourselves.

A future where Rhode Island harnesses the power and promise of the ocean to save our planet, and create a new industrial revolution with new, good jobs at every level and that will define America in the next century.

A future where we redesign our government to no longer be a den of corruption and self-service, but to be inclusive, and modern, and efficient.

A future where going to college and learning a trade are held in the same esteem, and both offer a pathway to economic security and dignity.

A future where we make life easier for seniors, not harder; easier for single moms juggling two jobs, not harder; easier for young entrepreneurs trying to open a business and create jobs, not harder.

I believe in Rhode Island, and I believe in Rhode Islanders. We have everything it takes to be the greatest, most prosperous state in America. Doing it is going to take fighting entrenched special interests. It’s going to take trying things we haven’t tried before, and allowing ourselves to be open to new ideas and new ways of doing business.

We don’t need just another politician who likes having a title to represent us. We don’t need opportunists who think that the people who live here are just pawns in a game. We need new blood with the courage to lead. We need a vision for a Rhode Island that works for all of us. This small state can be as big as it wants, and none of Rhode Island’s problems are not beyond Rhode Islanders to solve.

I’m going to need each and every one of your help to do this. I need you to sign up to volunteer with us this summer. I need you to give what you can to this campaign. And with you all behind me, I know we’re going to win.

Tonight, let us not simply curse the darkness, but light a candle. Let’s bring our state roaring into the future and show the country and the world that size doesn’t matter, heart does. That a hard history doesn’t matter, vision does. That fear does not matter, hope does.

Why? Obviously, people will be employed in construction. This will provide good wages and dignified work to Rhode Islanders and drive growth in our economy. It will alleviate the pressure on housing prices we’re seeing across the state and make sure that all of our communities benefit from growth in Rhode Island, not just those that are already doing well. It will help us to attract new investment into our state, bring our kids and grandkids back home, and ensure that Rhode Island doing well means all of us doing well.

Make no mistake: there is a housing crisis in Rhode Island. There are only two cities, (Providence and Central Falls), where someone can purchase a home with an income of less than $70,000 a year. (And that’s only if you don’t count the East Side of Providence!). We spend way less per resident ($8.86) on affordable housing creation than Massachusetts ($99.72) and Connecticut ($76.98). No, those are not typos. For the last six years, we’ve had fewer building permits issued per resident than any other state in the country. Yet, we keep seeing headline after headline about housing prices going up. Now, for some this might be a good thing. But for low-income Rhode Islanders, immigrant families, black families, and young people, it could be disastrous. We have to solve this problem. But how?

First, we need to invest in affordable housing and workforce housing. Take the Louttit Laundry development for example, which the state has invested in. This old building on Cranston Street in Providence is being redeveloped into affordable housing. There, the rent for about 75% of the units will be capped at 120% of the median income for the area it’s in, and the other 25% will be held for low-income residents earning 50–60% of the median income for the area. We need more investments like this, not less. There are also a lot of new, very nice apartment buildings going up around our city. We should take a page out of several other cities’ playbooks and ensure that a percentage of the units in those buildings are reserved for low-income residents of the neighborhoods they’re being built in. That way, we can drive new investment without destroying the rich fabric of our neighborhoods and keep families in their homes. We need to incentivize contractors to build more middle-class, multi-family housing across our state and keep supply in pace with demand. We’re not doing that today.

But we also need to increase investment in apprenticeship and training programs, so that the construction industry has the talent it needs. These are well paying jobs that come with the dignity of building something. We need to show our kids that building a home is just as important and rewarding as going to college and working at a tech company.

If we do this the right way, we can help Rhode Island make real progress. We can give black and Hispanic communities the leg up they have been denied for so long. We can give young people saddled with student debt — and I’ve got almost $100,000 of my own — the opportunity to start their careers and grow in Rhode Island. We can make Rhode Island a more attractive place for businesses to create jobs.

When I moved home to Rhode Island after graduate school, I knew I wanted to live on Federal Hill because it’s the place that first gave opportunity to my family when they immigrated to America at the beginning of the twentieth century. We need to ensure that opportunity exists for every single Rhode Islander. My childhood is filled with memories of Sunday dinners and visiting family and friends in tenement houses across Federal Hill and Mount Pleasant. Having an affordable and safe home is the heart of our economy. The word economy even comes from the Greek word for home. Like most things worth doing, reaching a goal of 40,000 new housing units by 2025 will be hard, it will be met with opposition, and it will take time. But we don’t have any other choice.