PROVIDENCE – Rep. Aaron Regunberg recently won his primary election, running unopposed, to secure his second two year term in the R.I. General Assembly.

Regunberg, 26, who describes himself as ideologically progressive and is proud and unafraid to say so, is one of the youngest members of the Legislature.

Regunberg first gained prominence three years ago when he was working with the Providence Student Union, championing the cause of high school students who had to walk more than two miles to school each way. [See link to ConvergenceRI story below.]

At the State House, Regunberg has become an outspoken voice for progressive politics: he led the effort to create a new legislative commission to study the practice of solitary confinement in Rhode Island; he has championed legislation to create a policy of earned sick leave in the state; and he has also been involved in organizing efforts around opposition to the proposed gas-fired power plant in Burrillville and the proposed LNG facility in Providence.

Regunberg chafes when people attempt to criticize millenials as a generation; he was a Bernie Sanders delegate at Democratic National Convention this summer in Philadelphia, galvanized by the issues raised by Sanders.

Here is the ConvergenceRI with Rep. Aaron Regunberg, in a conversation that took place at Seven Stars on Hope Street, discussing his hopes for Rhode Island on the cusp of change.

ConvergenceRI: In what seems like a short time ago, you were head of the Providence Student Union, organizing around the problem that many students had to walk two miles or more to school each day. Now you have just completed a successful primary campaign, running unopposed, which means you’ll be serving another two-year terms as a representative in the R.I. General Assembly. What have you learned on the journey? What drives you to continue to serve?
REGUNBERG: What drives me is that there are incredible number of Rhode Islanders who need some real change. There are thousands and thousands of working families that are struggling to make ends meet, that are working hard and still not able to get ahead.
That are not able to get a day off from work when they are sick to recover, because they are living so close to the edge.

The job of our government is to address [those issues].

What drives me is the climate crisis that is hurtling toward us. People talk about it like it is in the future, but we as know that it is already happening here, we’re already seeing its impact on Rhode Island, on Americans, and on hundreds of millions of people across the world.

We need some urgency when we are addressing that.

ConvergenceRI: When you look forward to next year’s legislative session, what is that you want to accomplish?
REGUNBERG: One of the most frustrating things about being one state representative is you are one out of 75 in that chamber. How the power works, let’s be honest, there’s a lot of centralized power, so you are much less than one-seventy-fifth of the overall group.

I found that I have to really zero in on a few specific issues in order to have hope in actually driving those issues forward; you have to hammer down on few issues.

What I’m focusing on for the next session are a few things.

In two weeks, I will be having the first meeting of my solitary confinement commission. Which I’ve very excited about; we’ve got stakeholders from across the spectrum.

The Department of Corrections is well represented, along with folks from the criminal justice reform community and the mental health community.

The goal of the commission is to try and bring the sides together in [support of] some common sense reforms to limit the amount of Rhode Islanders that are getting extended solitary confinement, which the United Nations has ruled is torture,

It will be great if we can come up with some recommendations in the next few months that can be done administratively.

I’ve told that to Director A.T. Wall; if not, there will be legislation again next year to push for reforms around solitary confinement.

Last year, the Department of Corrections, when I had put legislation in, was pretty much non-responsive.

Now, with the commission, there have been open lines of communication, and we’ve been talking a lot more, and there seems to be some degree of buy-in to the commission process. I am hopeful, but we’ll see.

There’s a ton of criminal justice reforms that we need to do, this is one specific area that I have focused in on.

ConvergenceRI: Why do you think that your criminal justice reform legislation did not pass last year?
REGUNBERG: First of all, it’s rare that a very controversial thing passes the first year it is introduced. We had legislative hearings; a lot of people came out, including a lot of former incarcerated Rhode Islanders and their families, to talk about this process and how unproductive it is. Then we had the corrections officers and the department say, those criminals, whom are you going to trust – their word, or our word?

And that is how it is in the General Assembly, that’s the side that won out.

Having said that, there were a lot of people who had never thought about this issue before, a lot of members of the Legislature, and this really put it on their radar, and they recognized that this something that we need to address.

As I said, I’m hoping that we can do this administratively, working with the commission.

ConvergenceRI: What else?
REGUNBERG: One of my top priorities, we’ve talked about this a little bit, is earned sick leave. I think this is an issue whose time has come in Rhode Island.

Massachusetts has passed this policy; Connecticut has passed this policy; Vermont has passed this policy. The Speaker always likes to say: we can’t be an outlier here in Rhode Island. Right now, we are an outlier.

It means that 41 percent of private sector workers in Rhode Island have no access to earned sick leave.

So, 41 percent of Rhode Islanders have to choose between putting food on the table, the security of their job, and their own health and the health of their kids.

I think that’s unacceptable, public health wise, because when folks aren’t able to take time off and come to work sick, they can spread that illness.

The food industry is notorious for not having paid sick leave, so these folks are often handling food.

And, of course, it’s a family issue, having worked with the public schools, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard from school nurses, that if a student comes to their office because they are sick, they say: don’t call my mom. She’s going to have to come pick me up, and she can’t lose her job.

So, it’s a family issue, too.

We’re looking to build a coalition with support from labor, from women’s groups, and from business owners. There are a lot of business owners who offer earned sick leave already, because they understand that it’s good for business.

It’s a big issue to bite off, but it feels like it shouldn’t be so controversial. I’m hopeful that we can pass it this year.

ConvergenceRI: Now that the primary election results are in, everyone is trying to read the tea leaves, and explain what they think happened. How do you see the results?
REGUNBERG: I believe that Rhode Island is a fundamentally progressive state. Progressive is label; but what it means to me, when I say it, is that you care about working families over the interests of the super wealthy.

You care about democracy, so that everyday folks have a voice, and not just the well connected, or the folks who can pay for lobbyists.

You think that everyone should have access to health care.

All these issues, the majority of Rhode Islanders believe in very strongly.

We saw that in the Presidential primary when Bernie Sanders, had a double-digit victory. And, I think we saw it last week in the results in the statewide primary.

I’m not going to say it’s a trend. But a lot of people did not expect progressives to win over powerful folks.

I think there are a lot of folks, on both the right and the left, who talk about the [anger] with the establishment machine, they frame it that way, that it is a blow to leadership.

From my understanding, that’s not the way to view what happened. The differences were about issue differences between the candidates: do you support a $15 minimum wage?

I think it was the issues that won. I hope that we’re going to see the results of that in the next legislative session.

ConvergenceRI: Do you think it’s difficult to be a young person in politics and be taken seriously by your elders? Do you feel that they are giving you the respect that you deserve?
REGUNBERG: As a young person, there’s always a little bit of challenge to be taken seriously.

I think the forces of sexism and racism outweigh those concerns. I think that, as a white male, it’s easier for me to be taken seriously, than potentially, an older woman of color. I think I have advantages and privileges because of what I look like.

One thing, its’ a tangent, it’s not exactly answering the question, but one thing that makes me mad, more than anything else, is what I see as deliberate, continuous attempt to discredit millenials.

When people say that millenials are lazy, they’re flighty, there is nothing that makes me more upset.

We are dealing with the most unequal society in generations; we are dealing with the most broken economy in decades. We’re dealing with the challenge of climate change that we’re going to have to live through.

Our generation is dealing with a lot, and we’re doing a frickin’ great job. We are propelling a new generation of progressive political leadership and we’re changing the conversation.

ConvergenceRI: One of the areas I cover is the emergence of the innovation ecosystem in Rhode Island, broadly defined. I often hear people talking about the desire and need to attract and retain millenials, to stay in Rhode Island. How do you respond to that? How do you think you can find your place, in a world that doesn’t allow you to fit in easily.
REGUNBERG: If we want to support and attract and retain folks from my generation, I don’t think it’s a puzzle about what we need to do.

My generation is drowning in student debt. It makes no economic sense. There are a huge number of folks I know who are not investing in that startup idea that they may have, or are not investing in buying a home, because all that money that would be going into our local economy, it’s going to pay for student loans, because we have this fundamentally broken system.

I don’t think there’s anything we can do more to jumpstart our economy than to create tuition-free higher education.

I hear all the time, not just from young people, but from parents from middle class families, that they are not investing in the local economy because they are saving for or plowing money into their kids’ education.

We’re the only country at this level of development that has such an unaffordable higher education system.

Next year, I am hoping to introduce, I don’t think it’s going to pass any time soon, legislation to create tuition-free education in Rhode Island.

By the way, Rhode Island is one of only 10 states that spend more on our Department of Corrections than we do on higher education.

We are spending more taxpayer dollars putting young black men into cages than we are in giving them the tools they need to succeed in this economy. That’s a big issue.

So is affordable housing. People can talk about [the need to attract] millenials, but they need to be able to live here.

Again, some people make fun of millenials because they are living in their parents’ basement. They’re not doing that because they want to, or because they’re not working harder, in many cases harder than people have in previous generations.

They’re doing that because previous generations wrecked the economy and destroyed the housing market.

So, we need to invest in affordable housing if we want millennials to stay.

Things like earned sick leave, things like a living $15 minimum wage, they are important.

When people think about millenials, they envision young workers in a tech place like Google; that’s not where most millenials are working.

A lot of milennials are working for minimum wage; a $15 minimum wage would be a game changer for a whole lot of young people.

ConvergenceRI: How old are you?
REGUNBERG: I’m 26. I feel like I’m getting old.

ConvergenceRI: Are you hopeful about the political process?
REGUNBERG: I am incredibly hopeful because of the success of the Bernie Sanders campaign. [I’m all in on Hillary right now, we need to defeat fascism and elect Hillary Clinton.]

When Bernie Sanders gets up on the stage, he’s a disheveled old guy from Vermont, he has a certain amount of charisma, it’s not like he’s bad at publid speaking, but he does not hae the “magic” of Obama.

But the reaction to him, and his incredible success, was not due to his strength as a candidate, but because he had [the guts] to get up there on the national platform and say, unfettered capitalism is not working very well for most Americans. People responded to that, they know it’s true, they see it in their own lives.

On the local state, I’m hopeful. I would never root for any of my colleagues to lose. But when an outspoken progressive, a black woman running on a $15 minimum wage platform, beats one of the most powerful people in the state of Rhode Island, I think that is a clear single for some real progressive change.

And that change is coming.