March 13th, 2026
Dear Leaders,
A few months ago, I wrote about Kina Collins as an example of the Protector Leadership Type — the kind of leader who steps into the arena not for recognition, but because they cannot stand by when care and courage fall out of balance.
Since then, I’ve had the privilege of spending significant time on her campaign as a volunteer, and I have learned so much. I will stand by my initial statement: Kina Collins is one of the most powerful voices I have ever witnessed in politics.
Not because she is overly polished in the way politics often rewards. Not because her words are engineered by consultants or carefully softened to avoid discomfort. Her power comes from something much rarer: she is a brilliant, politically savvy leader and what I believe to be a generational-level orator, willing to say the things many people in politics are unwilling to say out loud — and to say them with remarkable clairvoyance and poise.
When Kina talks about policy, she begins with the perspective that shaped her growing up on Chicago’s West Side. As she has said on the campaign trail:
“I think every representative in this country should live in the poorest area of their district, because If you lived in the poorest area of your district, you would think differently about whether there’s lead in the water your children drink or whether gun manufacturers should be held accountable when bullets fly through your window.”
That line alone reframes the conversation about representation. It asks a question that is asked too rarely in Washington: are we doing our job for neighbors or for our donors?
In speeches in living rooms and public parks, she moves easily between sharing lived experience and delivering structural critique. When she talks about economic justice, she refuses the softened language that often dominates political discourse. As Kina has put it bluntly:, she moves easily between sharing lived experience and delivering structural critique. When she talks about economic justice, she refuses the softened language that often dominates political discourse. As Kina has put it bluntly:
“The biggest welfare queens in America are millionaires and billionaires who do not pay taxes and face zero accountability.”
You can feel the room shift when she says that. It cuts through the polite narratives we often tell ourselves about inequality and replaces them with something harder and closer to the truth.
One of the lines of hers that has stayed with me the most is simple but profound. Kina often reminds audiences that “a budget is a moral document.” It’s a powerful way of saying that budgets reveal exactly who a society chooses to invest in and who it is willing to leave behind.
She illustrates that point with a statistic that stops people cold. As Kina frequently notes when speaking about the district:
“In the Seventh District [of Illinois] we see the death gap — a 30-year difference in life expectancy between the Gold Coast and the West Side.”
Thirty years.
A generation of life determined not by biology, but by policy decisions, investment, and neglect.
Her willingness to confront systems of power doesn’t stop at local inequities. She speaks just as directly about national priorities, especially when it comes to war and military spending. At one event she said:
“You cannot convince me to go back to the West Side of Chicago and tell people it is better for us to send billions of dollars for missiles and bombs than it is to open grocery stores in our communities.”
The comparison is stark, and intentionally so. It forces people to think about what we fund, what we neglect, and what those decisions reveal about our collective priorities.
Her political life has also been shaped by organizing around accountability in policing, co-authoring legislation, and building coalitions across the Midwest. Kina is also, in many ways, a futurist. In 2020, long before it entered mainstream political conversation, she was already arguing that the country should “Abolish ICE” (which is now mainstream) and rethink the role of immigration enforcement altogether.
Kina has often spoken about how systems that shield police misconduct create a culture where state power is rarely held accountable, and how similar patterns have shaped the actions of ICE agents operating in our communities. For her, these issues are connected by a deeper question about who the government is meant to protect.
She often describes the effort around her candidacy this way:
“We are the movement-building campaign.”
And now, seeing it from the inside, that description feels exactly right to me. This campaign has never been about the money– it has always been about the people and the goals of the work in Washington to bring equity to the people of IL-07.
What it has had instead of money, is lots of loyal people volunteering endlessly to get her to the top of the ballot.
Over the past few weeks alone, I am proud to have helped lead an effort to get 11,000 handwritten postcards out across the district. Those postcards represent more than 120 volunteers and over 460 hours of unpaid time — people sitting at kitchen tables, in living rooms, and at community events writing notes to neighbors they may never meet.
Every time I wrote one, I found myself trying to channel Kina’s ethos into those few sentences. In many ways, I was simply hoping to remind people that we have an opportunity to have someone “who will fight for us”.
Working on this campaign has challenged me to think about something larger than any single election and reflect more deeply on our work at BREAKTHRU. We often say that we want courageous leadership. But history shows that when that leadership challenges entrenched systems — especially when it comes from women of color — it frequently encounters the strongest resistance. And especially since Trump has been elected, we see it across institutions and in the numbers themselves. Over the past year alone, more than 300,000 Black women have been pushed out of the workforce, more than any other demographic group. The term misogynoir — the specific intersection of racism and sexism directed at Black women — exists because these patterns show up again and again.
Misogynoir doesn’t always announce itself loudly. Often it appeared quieter and more procedural. For me, it looked like the subtle dismissal of a popular progressive candidate in favor of a “fresh new face” who is largely untested (sound familiar, Jasmine Crockett vs. James Talarico?). It can look like leadership being measured primarily through fundraising totals and institutional backing rather than community support and organizing power (# of volunteers). It can look like a candidate being excluded from forums or debates because of financial thresholds, even when early polling shows they are a leading voice in the race. And it can look like endorsements being withdrawn or withheld with the explanation that a candidate has “lost before,” even when those earlier races took place under completely different circumstances (I see you, Activate Oak Park and Girl I Guess).
None of these decisions to exclude Black women happen in a vacuum. Together they shape who gets heard, who gets resourced, and whose leadership is treated as legitimate. Working on this campaign has reminded me how much effort it takes and I am incredibly proud of Kina and her ability to keep fighting. And that is why I know she will continue that fight in Washington.
To everyone who wrote postcards, knocked doors, made calls, hosted events, or simply talked to friends and neighbors about the campaign — thank you. I hope our postcards reached you. They were written for you.
And no matter what happens on Tuesday, March 17, one thing is certain for me personally: I will continue to fight for capable and powerful Black women to get their voices heard.
My biggest hope for Kina Collins at this moment in this context of our country, she is recognized for her amplifier the Legend, and she does something that most thought impossible without the funds or the infrastructure of other campaigns and she wins IL-07 and leads us all into the future we all deserve.
And if you are in our district, please vote for Kina Collins in IL-07 on March 17th.
