Meet the candidates for an At-Large seat on the D.C. Council

While D.C.’s eight wards each get a councilmember, there are also four at-large lawmakers who represent the entire city.

For the last 13 years one of those has been Councilmember Anita Bonds, a longtime political fixture and moderate Democrat who has been re-elected three times in part because multiple challengers would split the vote against her. In 2022, for example, she survived the Democratic primary with 35% of the vote; her three challengers got almost twice as many combined votes.

But the arrival of ranked-choice voting — which prevents someone from winning with a mere plurality of the vote — and Bonds’ decision late last year not to run again has shaken up the race for her seat. While dozens of people initially said they would run in the Democratic primary, nine ultimately qualified for the ballot. (There’s a separate special election on June 16 for an Independent At-Large seat; we’ll have a profile of those candidates next week.)

Beyond opening a path for a new voice on the council, whoever succeeds Bonds could swing the body one way or another. She was often a deciding vote in debates that pitted more progressive members against centrists — and more often than not, she’d side with the latter.  The range of candidates in the race is fascinating: there’s multiple former council staffers, a former DCPS principal, a former chair of the D.C. Board of Zoning Adjustment, a pharmacist, a labor leader, a former member of the State Board of Education, and a former member of the Biden administration.

Read below for profiles of each of the nine candidates for the At-Large seat.

Kevin Chavous

For those who’ve lived in D.C. for the last few decades, they might feel a sense of déjà vu when they meet Kevin Chavous. That’s because his father, Kevin P. Chavous, represented Ward 7 on the D.C. Council from the early 1990s to 2005.

That meant that Chavous, 41, grew up in a house where politics was often discussed. But it was visiting a public housing complex with his father after it caught fire that really stuck with him. 

He still remembers the pained look on one tenant’s face as she carried what she could save in a garbage bag. “I was like, ‘How could people — how could we allow this to happen?’” Chavous told The 51st. “There were just housing code violations all over the place. Just neglected completely.”

That moment fueled an interest in fair housing practices. As an undergraduate at Howard University, he worked at Housing Counseling Services helping renters organize tenant associations under the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, or TOPA, which gives tenants the first right to buy their building. When he attended law school at Howard, he spent a couple summers working for AARP’s Legal Housing for the Elderly.

Chavous ran his own practice after law school until 2022, when he became director of the Committee on Executive Administration and Labor, chaired by Councilmember Anita Bonds. So when he had a conversation with his boss about her potential retirement, Chavous felt it was his time to run. (Bonds has also endorsed him.)

“I think it’s very important to have people on the council that understand some of the history of D.C. and have connections to long-term residents,” says Chavous. “But also young enough to relate to newer populations — people who have moved here recently and are trying to build their life here.” 

Chavous is a parent, so education and youth services would be top priorities. Though he lives in Ward 7 with his family, his kids go to school in Ward 3 because the schools in his neighborhood lack resources. “That's sad, because it was that way when I grew up,” says Chavous. He wants to continue to fund out-of-school time programming, and for every school to have a counselor and a nurse — regardless of how many students are enrolled or what their funding looks like.

“We're talking about schools in some of the areas hardest hit by trauma that don't have counselors. To me, that’s not right,” he adds. 

If elected, Chavous also wants to see the council do more on inclusionary zoning requirements (which requires a certain number of affordable units to be built into some new developments) and bumping percentages up closer to 15% of total residential floor area (compared to the current 8-10%). 

Chavous believes his background as a lifelong D.C. resident and his experience on the council make him the best fit for the at-large role. “We can't afford to really have a council that's full of people who are trying to figure it out, especially when we're dealing with a hostile federal government,” he says.

He also prides himself on taking cues from his community — a skill he sees as crucial to the role of an at-large councilmember. “It's more so about listening and being a conduit from the community to the legislation,” says Chavous.

Dwight Davis

A longtime D.C. educator and former school principal, Dwight Davis delivers his campaign pitches the way you could imagine him bringing order to a rowdy hallway: he’s measured, but he’s authoritative. 

“Education is my jam,” says Davis, 51, of what he’d focus on if elected to the D.C. Council. “Education cuts through all of the other issues. It’s foundational. If we have an educated populace our crime rates drop. If we have a world-class education we don’t have food deserts, because everyone understands the importance of access to healthy food.”

Davis was born and raised in D.C. “by old-school Washingtonians,” he says, referring to his grandparents. He attended DCPS from Whittier Elementary through Coolidge High School, before attending Albright College in Pennsylvania — where he was a stand-out basketball player. That took him to Colombia for a stint playing semi-professionally, followed by graduate degrees in divinity and education from Princeton, and yet another bid for basketball fame, this time in England. 

He ultimately landed at DCPS as a fifth-grade teacher, where he remained for two decades. And while for some it may seem like a leap to go from educating to legislating, Davis says there’s a clear through line. 

“What makes me different is leadership,” he says. “I have been working with constituents to find solutions to problems my entire career, even as a fifth-grade teacher because I had 30 different constituents who wanted 30 different things. My job was, ‘How do I inspire all these people to be their brilliant selves?’” 

While Davis says his main focus would be public education in D.C. — where half the city’s 100,000 kids attend traditional public schools and the other half going to charters — he’s also concerned about overall affordability, an issue that is personal to him as a father of four children. (He thinks there needs to be more emphasis on building workforce housing for teachers, firefighters, nurses, and police.) He understands that living in D.C. can be expensive, but adds that the services residents get should match that price. And for that, he adds, better oversight of government agencies is needed — something he says a former principal is well placed to lead.

“Even when you have teachers who are underperforming, it doesn’t mean they want to underperform. A lot of the time they haven’t received the feedback they need to reform. There is a skill to providing feedback,” he says.

Despite pursuing politics, Davis hasn’t given up on some of his teacher habits. When we inquired who of his nine competitors might get his second-place ranking under ranked-choice voting, he demurred. “I don’t just want to give you the answer, I want you to research the answer,” he responded. “Everybody has to do their research.”

Dyana Forester 

Dyana Forester says she first understood D.C.’s inequity when she started commuting from her home in Southeast to her high school in Northwest. “That's when I first realized the disparity in the city, and as a child, I was angry and uncomfortable about it,” said Forester, 46, who grew up in a working class family.

At 18, Forester became a mom, and her drive to give her daughter a different life eventually sparked her career as a community organizer. At Teaching for Change, a social justice educational organization, she advocated for community school funding and to get parent coordinators into schools to enhance parental engagement. Later, she worked for the D.C. chapter of Jobs with Justice to demand Walmart pay workers a living wage — which Forester says ultimately didn’t succeed. But when she became the political and community affairs director for the United Food and Commercial Workers (UCFW) Local 400, she worked on successful legislation to increase the minimum wage and implement paid family leave in D.C.

Labor has been a running theme in Forester’s career (she’s won the endorsement of some unions, too). After working at UFCW for four years, she was elected as president to the AFL-CIO’s Metropolitan Washington Council. Today, she’s the senior director of labor relations to Maryland Governor Wes Moore.

“This is my opportunity to actually know what it's like on the inside of government to not just legislate change, but to implement it,” says Forester of her decision to take the role, which focuses on coordinating support for workers in Maryland. 

Forester acknowledged that the next council is going to face serious challenges. “We are going to be in a tough place, and we're going to have to balance our budgets,” says Forester. “But we have to balance it in a way that's to D.C. values, and puts working families and people that are struggling to stay here and call D.C. home first.”

As a former commissioner at D.C. Housing Authority, housing is a major priority for Forester. She’s interested in workforce housing for teachers, firefighters, bus drivers, and police officers. And like other candidates, she wants more affordable housing — but pushed back on building faster as the first priority. “I think the intent is right, but … is this the right solution for the problem that we want to fix? And the fix is, how do we create more for affordable housing for families?”

Forester says if she were to win, her goal isn’t to be a councilmember forever. But it was her experience as a working class single mom that pushed her to run in the first place. “I don't want to be talked about as data,” says Forester. “I want to be there representing what it means when we make cuts to childcare, when we say that we can't afford healthcare,” says Forester. “I'm representing what's missing.”

Fred Hill

You may not know Fred Hill, at least not directly. But if you look around D.C., there’s a chance that his influence is staring you in the face.

For 10 years before jumping into the council race, Hill, 57, was the chairman of the Board of Zoning Adjustment, a little known yet consequential five-member board that weighs requests from residents and developers who want to build something that may not align with zoning regulations. Say you want to extend your rowhouse a few feet beyond the permissible lot occupancy; BZA is the place you would go for permission.

So what would make someone so steeped in the minutiae of D.C.’s zoning regulations want to jump into a political race? 

“Working with ANCs and community groups and the developers, I got an eye for the whole city,” he tells The 51st. “I came to enjoy working through issues with the community and trying to get to a resolution, to actually get something done. Not everyone got their way, but we got things finished.”

Hill says the experience also lends itself to a pressing issue in D.C.: housing. He says his time on the BZA showed him how projects can be derailed when they get tied up in bureaucracy. If elected, Hill would propose that any affordable housing project that gets city financing be fast-tracked to ensure that it’s not delayed to death.

Hill also ran his own federal contracting firm for almost three decades, which he says gives him direct insight into the needs of small businesses in D.C. — and what the council needs to do to spur local job growth in the wake of the sweeping federal government layoffs. 

“There are 13 members [on the council] and almost all of them came from inside the system. I’m coming from the private sector and I think there should be one businessperson on the council,” he says. “Business is the energy to fuel the community.”

That business-friendly moderation — which Hill similarly sees in Kenyan McDuffie, who he supports for mayor — extends to an issue that’s been highlighted by almost every candidate in the race: Republican attacks on D.C.’s autonomy. 

Hill says he would fight to protect the city’s home rule, but wants to be more strategic about how and when those fights are waged. It’s a lesson he says he learned growing up in what was then rural Poolesville, Maryland as the “Asian-looking kid” (his father is Native American, while his mother immigrated from Sikkim, a state in northeast India that was an independent kingdom until 1975), where he was bullied. 

“I learned that when they are bigger than you are, you have to work the system to be able to survive and get your way,” he says. “I think being an activist is not necessarily something I would bring to the table.”

Greg Jackson

Up until 2013, Greg Jackson had lived a very D.C. life: He’d worked for a big consulting firm, jumped over into electoral politics as a co-chair of D.C. for Obama, and ended up at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. 

But it was that year that Jackson, now 41, experienced something else that was all too normal in D.C.: He was caught in the crossfire of a shooting in Shaw. He nearly died, and it took six surgeries and six months for him to recover.

“At that time over 500 people were being shot every year, so the story was common," he says. "My tragedy shined a light on interpersonal violence in inner cities. I saw how little was being done on this issue.”

His career took a turn, with stints as the director of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s Office of Community Relations and Services, the D.C. Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, and ultimately the White House, where he served as the deputy director of the Office of Gun Violence Prevention under President Joe Biden.

Now Jackson says he wants to focus locally again, especially with the persistent problem of homicides, shootings, and violent crime in D.C. (He lives in Congress Heights, and says shootings have been a regular occurrence.) 

“Public safety is definitely what I talk to folks about. It’s front of mind for every voter. I will say for me it’s more than crime prevention. It’s also how we’re investing in jobs, how we are strengthening our schools, how we provide more mental health resources,” he says.

Jackson says it also means adopting more evidence-based strategies like Baltimore and Miami, both of which have seen dramatic decreases in killings. “We haven’t had the leadership and policymakers,” he says.

While his experience with gun violence underlies much of what he says motivated him to run for council, Jackson says he’s also focused on other areas. He wants D.C. to invest more in pathways to home ownership, and says he would support small entrepreneurs and battle to protect home rule.

“We are in a unique time where we have aggressive federal overreach and we need someone with allies in Congress and who understands how the White House works,” he says. “I’m the only one who has battled in the congressional arena.”

Jackson is still figuring out who else he’ll rank on his ballot, but says he likes Dwight Davis, Lisa Raymond, and Candace Tiana Nelson. 

At the end of the day, though, he says he’s best-suited for the seat: “I have the most dynamic experience of any of the candidates.”

Leniqua’dominique Jenkins

Leniqua’dominique Jenkins, 40, arrived in D.C. in 2010 via a well-worn path: as an unpaid intern on Capitol Hill. 

Jenkins worked a nine-to-five for former Congressman Alan Grayson (who represented her home state of Florida) followed by evening shifts at a retail job, while splitting a basement apartment with a friend to make ends meet.

“I feel like I've been in an affordability crisis before it was declared an affordability crisis,” Jenkins tells The 51st. 

When her parents, brother, and his children moved to live with her in Southeast D.C. a couple years later, she continued to feel the financial pressure of living in the city. But after looking into different resources and programs that the city offered, she got her certificate in entrepreneurship at Operation Hope, which helped her start the home care agency she operated for 10 years, Capitol Living.

Through her business, Jenkins trained others to be care assistants, including her father and brother, who were adjusting to life after incarceration. “That to me, is a form of activism,” she says. 

Activism and community engagement has been a lifestyle for Jenkins, she says, not just “a particular moment.” When she moved to Deanwood with her family, where she currently lives, she ran for the vacant ANC seat and served as a one-term commissioner focused on environmental justice.

In 2021, she ran against Bonds for the At-Large council seat — the very one she’s running for now. While she didn’t make the ballot, she ended up working in Bonds’ office as a staffer for a year. After her stint in the council, Jenkins served as the program director of East River Family Strengthening Collaborative’s senior socialization hub for a few years before leaving her job to run for the at-large seat again.

Jenkins is running on “the three E’s”: equity, education, and environmental justice. If elected, she’d prioritize ensuring that kids are reading on level by third grade. “That is a major indicator of academic and personal outcome,” Jenkins says.

She also wants to make it easier to stay and grow old in D.C. by equipping senior services with better technology. “I would modernize that platform and make sure we have a dashboard where senior services are all in one place, and we can check the integrity of the services that we're using to take care of our most prized possession, which is the people that we love," she says.

Jenkins says voters should rank her first because of the diversity of her work experience. “I'm not a single issue candidate,” she says. Jenkins also sees her experiences as a resident who lives east of the river as crucial for the job of an at-large councilmember today. 

“What's happening east of the river is a macro example of what's happening at a micro level throughout the city,” says Jenkins. “They've been historically overlooked.”

Candace Tiana Nelson

Like any legislative body, the D.C. Council is where laws get written — and that’s often what gets most attention. (Remember Schoolhouse Rock’s bill on Capitol Hill?) But for Candace Tiana Nelson, another one of the council’s key responsibilities often gets overshadowed — oversight.

“It is one of the most important things, and for me, when I was at the council, it was eye opening because I felt like a lot of it was performative,” she says. “You will see that not even all the councilmembers show up to the hearings.”

Nelson, 50, speaks from a position of authority — her most recent stint in D.C. government was as chief of staff to Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George, after all. But her local government resume spans almost 20 years, with stops in five city agencies under various mayors and as the leader of Attorney General Brian Schwalb’s transition into office after he was first elected in 2022.

It’s that range of experience that the Brightwood resident says makes her especially ready to dig into what the city is doing and what it could do better, especially as it faces leaner budgets and louder questions about how public dollars are being spent.

“It’s really important for a councilmember to understand what they’re overseeing, and having worked at five agencies and served as a chief of staff, I will understand oversight,” she says. 

Nelson says what initially motivated her to jump into electoral politics after two decades of being behind the scenes was seeing how the D.C. government responded to the Republicans’ increased attacks on the city over the last 15 months; she said there simply wasn’t enough communication between the city’s top leaders, or even within the council.

That’s why she wants the council to have its own office to deal with federal affairs, instead of just one person in Chairman Phil Mendelson’s office. Nelson also thinks the council needs improvements: she’ll push for a stand-alone committee on education, and to bring back a committee focused exclusively on finance and revenue. Nelson also says she wants councilmembers to schedule hearings at times and in places that are more convenient for regular people.

“To me that’s accessibility, taking the government to the people,” she says.

Nelson doesn’t shy away from particular issues she’d pursue, either — she says she’d zero in on foundations like education, healthcare, and housing, ensuring they are “accessible, affordable, and high-quality.” But even there, oversight works its way back into our conversation. D.C. already spends a lot of money on housing; she says good oversight could ensure it’s getting more out of that money.

“Good government may not sound sexy or nice, but it’s necessary,” she says. “I hope that more people see that.”

Oye Owolewa

By trade Oye Owolewa is a pharmacist, a profession that may not seem to lend itself directly to politics. But it does make for clever campaign pitches. “The prescription is statehood,” he said during his interview with The 51st, adding that he workshopped a lot of pharmacist slogans.

Catchy pitches aside, Owolewa, 36, is also a former ANC commissioner in his neighborhood, having won his first race in 2018 by a single vote. For the last six years, he has served as D.C.’s shadow representative, essentially one of the city’s unpaid statehood advocates. (There are also two shadow senators.)

Like many D.C. residents, Owolewa says he’s been shocked by Republican interference in the city — sometimes without much official pushback from the city’s leadership.

“Last year was very difficult for D.C. We were seeing Black Lives Matter Plaza ripped up, our budget tampered with, and a National Guard invasion of our city. People were wondering why our council wasn’t being more forceful,” he says.

Owolewa says he’ll fight the fight with the feds, pointing to his recent leadership of protests against the construction of an ICE headquarters on the grounds of the St. Elizabeth’s campus in Ward 8. (The new building, which would be alongside the Department of Homeland Security headquarters, has been planned for years.) 

But Owolewa also says that he’d prioritize making the University of the District of Columbia tuition-free, both to help struggling residents and to serve as an incubator for laid-off federal workers who need a new career path. He adds that he’d focus on spurring new businesses and jobs, push to increase literacy programs, and focus on healthcare, especially as federal and local cuts for programs serving low-income residents are on the horizon. 

“We need a councilmember who understands healthcare intimately, who can stop people from falling between the cracks,” he says.

To do all these things, D.C. would need additional money. Owolewa supports a new tax on D.C.-based law firms and lobbyists who don’t currently have to pay the city’s business taxes, but also says that the city could do a better job scouring the current budget and agencies to find savings. “We need to audit the government, especially the schools. When you audit you often find 5-10% in savings. It’s not about firing anyone, but finding ways to save money,” he says. (Owolewa has been endorsed by a number of labor unions, the Sierra Club, and other groups.)

Like Greg Jackson, Owolewa lives in Congress Heights; along with Kevin Chavous, Dyana Forester, and Leniqua'dominique Jenkins, they are the candidates who live east of the Anacostia River. “I have been to the highest parts of the District and live in the most marginalized part,” he says. “We need someone who lives here, who knows here, who’s served here.” 

Lisa Raymond

In the late 1990s, Lisa Raymond found herself in the basement of a grocery store in Southwest D.C., painting the walls of what would become Cesar Chavez Public Charter School (which has since relocated). Originally from Connecticut and just a year into living in D.C. with her husband, this is what got her hooked on education policy in the District.

After she joined the school as their chief of operations (and later as their chief operating officer), she noticed a recurring problem. “Kids were showing up so far behind when they came to us,” says Raymond, 56. “We'd have ninth graders who were reading three to four grade levels behind.”

So when Tommy Wells ran and won the Ward 6 council election in 2006, it meant there was an open seat on the D.C. State Board of Education — and Raymond saw an opportunity to fix the problems she was seeing. She ran for the seat, which represented Wards 5 and 6, and won. But months later, a law passed that transferred the powers of the D.C. Board of Education (now the State Board of Education) to the mayor.

Raymond, a Capitol Hill resident, laughs when she recalls the mayoral takeover. “I was ready to roll up my sleeves and get in there," she tells The 51st. Still, she felt the experience was substantive, pointing to her work on passing graduation requirements. 

After serving one term on the State Board of Education, Raymond went to work as a senior advisor on education for D.C. Council’s Committee of the Whole in 2011. Since then, Raymond has worked in a range of roles: education, fundraising, and serving as the chief of staff to D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine from 2018 to 2020.

With deep roots in education and as a mom to two kids, childcare would be a natural priority if Raymond won the at-large seat. She thinks the city has the basic tools for good childcare policy, like the Pay Equity Fund, but that there needs to be a reconvening of advocates and policymakers on the amount of childcare seats needed in the city. 

Housing is also a top issue for Raymond (and she’s also won the endorsement of a handful of various groups that focus on housing, including Greater Greater Washington, DC Yimbys, and D.C. Association of Realtors). “We have to take a good look at what we are doing as a city, what we're doing that gets in the way,” she says about building more housing — but “it's not an invitation to developers to come in here and do whatever they want,” she adds.

Ultimately, Raymond believes her work experience — in nonprofits, as an elected member of office, in council and the attorney general’s office — makes her stand out from the other candidates. “No one else has the combination that I have,” she says.