As the former executive of multi-million dollar non-profit organizations, Dianne Morales is used to being in control.

"There's the tension between me being the one that is used to being the executive, and saying we're going to do this -- and me being the candidate," Morales told NY1 during a recent interview in her home in Brooklyn.

 

What You Need To Know

  • Morales lives in the Bed-Stuy section of Brooklyn with her college-age children and parents

  • She is the only Latina in the race so far

  • Morales used to manage multi-million dollar non-profit organizations, a skill she says would be useful at City Hall

 

The tension she describes comes from being a first-time candidate, with no political experience and now launching herself into a crowded race to run America's biggest city at a time of deep crisis.

For now, the dining room in her home is her campaign war room. She conducts campaign meetings through a computer screen, meets with volunteers via Zoom and takes time to read through message threads some of them participate in.

Morales is the only Latina in the race so far. She is a single mother who raised her children not far from the home she grew up in on Dekalb Avenue in Brooklyn. She now shares her Bed-Stuy home with her two college-age children and her parents who were living in Puerto Rico before the pandemic began. 

She says it's experiences like her that are missing at the highest levels of government at City Hall.

"We need not only our voices at the table, but we need to be the voice," Morales said. "Representation is not enough, there is something about the reflection of certain experiences -- as a woman, as an Afro-Latina, as a single mother, I bring all of that to the table. I have first-hand experience about what it means to be all those things."

Sitting on the stoop of her Bed-Stuy home, Morales says she has seen change and improvement through the decades, but she also witnesses what divestment and lack of government action can do to a community. 

"A lot of people just were made an offer they could not refuse," Morales says referencing the mortgage crisis of 2008. "They couldn't keep up with the maintenance, these are very old homes so they left. So there has been a change in the way the community feels. A lot of the folks that have come in don't share that feeling of community, so that feels like a loss."

Of the crowded mayoral field so far, Morales could be seen as one of the more left leaning candidates. She was an early backer of calls to defund the police and recently she recalled her own son's experience with police during the George Floyd protests last summer when tensions escalated. 

"I remember grabbing my daughter's arm, mamma bear instinct, and grabbing my son pulling him against my chest and making eye contact with the officer and saying 'he's mine' and there was something in that moment that broke," she said. 

But that position could put her at odds with a wide swath of voters who support police reform but don't want fewer officers in their neighborhoods.

"I want to have the conversation. I don't think anybody thinks about a safe community and thinks of police, not even the elders. We need to drastically re-imagine it, because it's not working," Morales said. 

With little name recognition and the need to raise money at a fast clip, Morales is looking at an uphill climb that doesn't seem to rattle her. Her voters, she says, will be anyone who has felt ignored by City Hall.

"I think it's anybody who they have felt like their voice didn't matter, they weren't represented and who felt like they didn't matter to anyone in their government," she said.