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Stamford Board of Education member Fritz G. Chery joined News 12’s Gwen Edwards to talk more about his goal to create a safe space for residents to express their concerns to elected officials.

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Our Lives: Stamford Board of Education member helps organize sessions for residents and local candidates to communicate

This is our lives. I'm Gwen Edwards. My guest today is a man with a plan. His plan is to bring minority residents of Stanford together to talk about the past, the present and the future. Fritz G. Sherry is a member of the Stanford Board of Education. Welcome to our lives. Thank you so much for having me. What inspired you to come up with this plan? Yeah, son of Haitian immigrants here in the city. My parents became citizen almost 30 years ago and they never missed an election however many times they would go and they would vote for candidates that they weren't really familiar with. So this year, I really wanted to try and change that by bringing people together and bringing the elected officials to come before them and talk a little bit about themselves, talk about their plans and really create that a safe place where communication uh can happen and conversation can uh for many people even begin. Now, you held your first session earlier this month. What did you hear? I am a member of the board. We had over 100 people attend. So you can clearly see that the need for a communication between the residents of Stanford and our elected officials is, is, is, is a great need. Uh We had a number of people come and express concerns about affordable housing here in the city of Stanford, we had a number of parents come and talk about what their experience has been like in uh the Stanford public school system more. So people were looking to get more involved. Extremely encouraging for me. there is a language barrier, but it's not that they don't care about getting involved. Um Many of the times they really just need a lot of the information translated that come in and the quality of the buildings of this last event that we had, we had everything translated in Haitian creole and Spanish so that everyone can feel welcome and everyone can get that extra clarification. What are you hoping to get out of this with the information that people are sharing in these sessions? Hopefully in the next election, they would consider themselves running for public office. And now that we have this venue, they would have a safe place to go and talk to the people directly. Everyone has an opportunity to ask questions. Everyone has the right for their voice to be heard. And speaking of voice, I like the title of the sessions. Lift every voice, every single one of them has a voice, every single one of them should feel like someone is listening. And I think that was one of the messages that came across clear at our last meeting. Now, your next session is coming up in October on October 30th at 6 p.m. which is a Monday. Our sole focus is going to be on education and again, action items, we want people to yes come out and express their thoughts and ask their question. But we're also going to put the action back to them. How can they get more involved? How can they help? Well, Fritz G Sherry, we thank you so much for being a guest on our lives. Thank you so much for this opportunity and we want to thank you for watching our lives where we bring you information and interviews that you will see nowhere else for our lives. I'm Gwen Edwards.

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