Joy Hollingsworth during a “photo op” to show off her new campaign signs at Monday’s announcement (Image: CHS)
The 2023 race for the District 3 seat representing the neighborhoods around Capitol Hill and the Central District at the Seattle City Council has started.
Monday morning, cannabis farming entrepreneur and Central District resident Joy Hollingsworth is scheduled to announce the launch of her campaign for the seat held by Kshama Sawant, a divisive but energetic political leader who has won a string of campaign victories driven by young voters and renters to become the longest serving member on the council:
A third-generation Central District neighbor, Joy enters the race focused on a healthy and safe city, youth enrichment, supporting our small business owners and equity for our community. The product of a long line of educators and civil rights leaders, she works to build community by establishing relationships based on trust and commitment. Joy wants to return these values to the district and fight for the District 3 communities she has known and loved all her life.
Hollingsworth is making her announcement Monday morning at the MLK FAME Community Center in the eastern edges of D3 before taking part in the annual MLK Day rally and march starting at Garfield High School.
“Joy is announcing her campaign on Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day at the MLK FAME Community Center in honor of Dr. King’s legacy and to launch her campaign in his same spirit of service and the power of community,” the announcement reads.
Her campaign describes the candidate as “a small business owner, food justice advocate, and longtime community leader.”
UPDATE: In her 30-minute announcement rally that filled the community center, Hollingsworth said she wants to bring her experience as a Black and queer woman in Seattle to City Hall.
“My perspectives on policy and public service are informed by my real life experiences rolling up my sleeve to serve historically excluded communities, building a small business, advocating for our youth, and using our platform for community reinvestment programs,” Hollingsworth said.
Flanked by her family including her wife and community leaders including Reverend Carey Anderson of 14th Ave’s First AME Church, the candidate told the crowd she would bring “practical applied perspectives to a city council that is missing a Black, LGBTQIA perspective” and said she would promote “progressive and practiced strategies to address root causes of seemingly intractable issues.”
Her community work has included helping coordinate the Emergency Feeding Program with area cannabis stores including Uncle Ike’s. She is the granddaughter of civil rights leader Dorothy Hollingsworth who died last summer at the age of 101.
UPDATE: The relationship between the Hollingsworth company and Ike’s owner Ian Eisenberg has been strong. The Hollingsworth Cannabis Company made Ike’s “the exclusive retailer of its products in Seattle,” according to this 2021 press release. In the release, Hollingsworth said the reasons behind the deal were “both personal and professional.”
“I’ve known Ian (Eisenberg, owner of Uncle Ike’s) for quite a while. We identify with each other on a personal level,” Hollingsworth says in the writeup. “We both went to the same private high school, although not at the same time. Seattle Prep is a Catholic school in the Central District that is predominantly white. I’m black. Ian is Jewish. So we relate to the experience of being a bit different while growing up. It provides a different perspective. Ian and I see things similarly.” UPDATE: As many have noted, Seattle Prep is located not in the Central District but on 11th Ave E in North Capitol Hill.
At Monday’s announcement rally, Hollingsworth also thanked her parents for attending and for their years of service to the community. Hollingsworth’s father worked at Seattle Parks. Her mother worked with the King County Housing Authority.
In her wide ranging remarks, Hollingsworth laid out basic platforms of her campaign including “expanding affordable housing and home ownership opportunities and “keeping people that are currently in their home today,” investing in “new ways to localize our healthy food resources,” “nourishing small businesses — we are a community of beautiful small businesses — we have to nourish them, cultivate them, and make sure that they’re doing well in our community,” engaging youth, protecting the rights of the LGBTQIA community, and “securing our communities with a recent rise of gun violence,” and “serving other communities that have long found a home here in District 3.”
Following the session, volunteers began the process of collecting contributions and signing up attendees to help the campaign including a planned Democracy Voucher drive. To qualify, a city council candidate must first collect 150 qualified contributions and 150 qualified signatures with half coming from the district.
While the campaign succeeded with a well attended and enthusiastic launch, it has been a rush to bring the effort together with some key elements like the campaign website not yet in place. UPDATE: The site is now live at joyforseattle.com.
The campaign begins
While Sawant sets up as a powerful incumbent opponent, the official race for District 3 is wide open — only a first-timer and a repeat perennial candidate have so far officially registered their campaigns. Sawant has not yet announced her plans as a string of her fellow incumbents have said they will bow out and not run.
In 2019, the last time she had to defend her seat, Sawant launched her campaign in late January. “This year will be a referendum on one vital question: Who runs Seattle? Amazon and big business or working people?,” Sawant said in her kickoff speech that year. That November, she defeated Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce-backed business community leader Egan Orion in a hugely expensive race that divided District 3.
Sawant would enter the race this time from a much different starting point after facing down a hard fought recall battle in 2021. The recall fight hinged on charges including Sawant’s participation in a protest march to then-Mayor Jenny Durkan’s home address that had been kept secret due to her past role as a federal prosecutor but was fueled by fervent political opposition to Sawant’s efforts to increase taxes and spending for social programs while attacking pro-police and pro-business funding efforts.
CHS examined Sawant’s successful 2021 defense of her seat on the council here as Sawant’s office tabled across the district and went hard on their rent control agenda, centering her political identity in her involvement with the working class.
She won that battle but remains the most divisive figure in Seattle politics.
Before the recall, the Socialist Alternative leader also twice defended her seat against business community-backed candidates defeated by strong support for Sawant in the most densely populated areas of Capitol Hill and the Central District. But the maps show clear areas of vulnerability in the wealthiest areas of her district. Losing support in the Central District’s core could hobble the Socialist Alternative campaign efforts.
Meanwhile, there are more renters than ever in the densest areas of District 3 and the new redistricting borders seem likely to increase tenant representation in the district with the addition of Eastlake.
The divisions in the district and some of the fissures Sawant cultivates can run hot. In October, the Leschi area resident lashed out at police for not doing more about threatening incidents targeting her home with bags of suspected human poop.
Hollingsworth, who will turn 39 in March, graduated from the Seattle Prep in 2002 and is a member of the Capitol Hill private high school’s sports hall of fame for her prowess on the basketball court. She would go on to play collegiately before launching a college career at Seattle University. She left sports behind in 2013 to be part of The Hollingsworth Cannabis Company and the booming marijuana farming industry. She oversees operations and frequently acts as spokesperson for the Shelton-based company, speaking out on equity issues in the industry. Meanwhile, the pot industry continues to mature a decade into legalization in the state with producers like the Hollingsworths facing challenges including high costs and margins eroded by the state’s high the excise tax.
In addition to issues around race, equity, the cannabis industry, and food equity, Hollingsworth and her wife also have some first-hand experience with street safety around Central Seattle — KING 5 talked with the 23rd and John-area resident last year about the notoriously dangerous intersection. SDOT has now overhauled the intersection with new protected turn signals and markings.
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Sounds like a candidate who might understand the district and the problems of its residents _and_ its small businesses.
Personally I do still support Sawant. But Hollingsworth might be able to pull this off. IMO, all she needs to do is not accept any affiliation, donations or endorsements from SBA or Amazon.
But if she does accept any affiliation, donations or endorsements from them Sawant has the race locked down.
This is really key to me. I despised Orion for being an Amazon shill.
Egan Orion was and is a 3rd generation Capitol Hill local and longtime LGBTQ+ community organizer. The accusations of him being “an Amazon shill” were pure dogma out of the Sawant campaign. Whose funding, it should be remembered, was majority not from Seattle or D3.
Perhaps, but as a purely tactical matter Orion should have pushed back hard against Amazon spending money on his behalf. I hope and trust Hollingsworth is savvy enough not to make the same mistake.
Agree. It’s what cost him the election.
I’m sure Sawant and her minions will find all sorts of reasons to shit on this person
Orion didn’t accept any money from Amazon. Their PAC spent money on his behalf. He was legally prohibited from communicating with them in any way.
@Claire Technically that’s true. But “communicating with a PAC” doesn’t include public statements made in the course of campaigning. Orion could have and should have disavowed and condemned Amazon’s PAC spending loudly and forcefully at every opportunity. “I agree with Sawant about this one thing: Amazon should not be deciding who this district’s next council member will be. I call on them to immediately cease and desist their spending on my behalf.” Imagine the flood of positive publicity he would have gotten from doing that! Since the race was close to begin with he very likely would have won. Hopefully, whoever managed his campaign found another line of work following that fiasco.
I hope we get a few more challengers. I don’t like this woman or Sawant.
Strikes me this is the way to do it in D3, if replacing Sawant is the goal: contest the left, not the center
I agree. Hollingsworth would split the far-left vote and win the moderates in a race between her and Sawant. Hollingsworth is still too lefty for my taste, but I’d bite for her in a heartbeat over Sawant. I hope a moderate challenger doesn’t enter and upset this dynamic.
And now we know Sawant has declined to run again, sooo…back to the drawing board.
I like Sawant. I will keep supporting her. Idpol be damned.
I am intrigued by her initial message. Sawant doesn’t care about the health of DIII as that health includes small businesses and small art spaces long neglected under her watch.
We’ve all seen the neighborhood go downhill in the last few years. The violence, the empty storefronts, the constant battle against open air drug use and such — Sawant has had zero to say on any of it. Many are ready for a change.
Ahh, good to see the chamber of commerce and Amazon has found another person to run for the “good of small business” and not at all to unseat the last remaining anti-amazon vote on the council.
I wasn’t wrong! (see above)
Finally, a gay black candidate we can all support!
Pam Banks?
Wow! Doesn’t she sound exactly what we need!!! She has my vote! Goodbye to you know who. Thank you.
I’ve got that Joy, Joy, Joy down in my heart today!!!
Hollingsworth sounds like exactly what we need jn D3: a long-standing local with actual deep ties to Seattle who cares and will listen to loca residents. Not a grandstanding new arrival more interested in fundraising for an international organization that has never stood for D3 or any of its actual residents.
Remember Sawant only won the recall by 309 votes out of 41,000 total cast. Her support has a hard ceiling.
They need to enforce against her ADA violating vote printing tent kiosks. As an ADA individual I have had to avoid walking on streets where Sawants vote harvesting efforts are set up due to sidewalk blockage. This is kind of a big deal for some of us – not that the Socialist Alternative paid shills flying into Seattle from worldwide to do fundraising would care. They didn’t care last time.
She’s got my vote! Hollingsworth sounds like she actually understands the district, unlike Sawant, who’s accomplished nothing of value during her ridiculously long tenure, and divided this once vibrant neighborhood into pro-Sawant and anti-Sawant factions while aiding and abetting poverty. Honestly, a wet napkin could run against Sawant and I’d vote for it.
If Kshama decides to run,Joy Hollingsworth will have to station her hippest most ardent supporters on every street corner in the days before the election, print ballots under tents , challenge every passerby with bent and impossible promises,slip into restricted private condos and apartments and if they say they don’t support her and glare like they just kicked their dog.
I have witnessed this behavior each time Sawant runs.
She definitely has to have a better ground game than the recall campaign did, but that’s an extremely low bar to clear.
She is an interesting candidate, and I am in the “ABS” (anyone but Sawant) camp. But I would like to know more about her position on the defund police proposal. If she is in favor of that, then no way.
Sawant has her flaws but has also continued to argue for many of the same things I heard advocated for at the MLK rally and March this Monday. I wish the anti-Sawant crowd could focus a fraction of their energy on positive change that they actually have control over…