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English education for new Americans: I returned to the Attleboro Literacy Center for a roundtable with its staff and students. The Literacy Center teaches immigrants English and also offers guidance in establishing new lives in the United States. I spoke with men & women from Syria, Haiti, Brazil, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Cambodia, Lebanon, and Egypt. Their words are more powerful than my own in describing the role of the Literacy Center and English-language instruction:
“Opened up so many doors for me.”
“Gives me opportunity.”
“Like family.”
“[Here in the United States], maybe we’re not rich, but we’re happy. We live good.”
We discussed housing, employment, and childcare. At a moment when the U.S. immigration system frustrates all of us, and the politics of immigration are so toxic, focusing on areas of common cause – like teaching English and assisting assimilation – is vital to making progress.
New housing, old theater in Attleboro: With state & local officials, I walked through Attleboro’s economic development. We visited Morin’s Diner to see the renovation & hear from the longtime owner about the new ambience and servings on offer when it reopens this fall. We toured a new housing development, bringing much-needed housing supply to the region, and then went inside Union Theatre to learn about its impending revival as a downtown arts & culture destination. I got to inspect the aging film still on the reel (D2: The Mighty Ducks, an old favorite).
I also met with Abram Agayby, owner of County Square Pharmacy, to nerd out on reform to the pharmacy-benefits system that price-gouges small business owners like him and raises health-care costs for everyone. I’m impressed by the creativity & enterprise of Dr. Agayby.
Building more housing & third places in Taunton: The Taunton mayor & I joined state & local officials for an economic development tour of the city. We met at a brownfield site in the Whittenton neighborhood with a developer seeking to build hundreds of units of housing along with commercial and green space amenities. As always – I pressed them on building less parking, more housing, and better multimodal options. I was especially interested to learn about the developer’s intent to use offsite construction (prefabricated modules) to build the housing faster & cheaper at comparable quality. Offsite construction is one way, along with land-use & permitting reforms, to produce more affordable housing in the United States, and the Metropolitan Area Planning Commission is studying how it might scale up in Massachusetts.
I was also able to visit the Broken Chains Biker Church, whose worship and services cater to bikers. The congregation has renovated the church and also provides housing and rehabilitation. Down the street from the church is a boarded-up retail property that Taunton’s MassDevelopment fellow, Misha Thomas, is seeking to redevelop into a third place for the neighborhood.
Picking up the pieces from Steward with Brown University Health: The mayors of Fall River & Taunton and I met with John Fernandez, CEO of Brown University Health, which now owns Saint Anne’s & Morton hospitals in Fall River & Taunton following Steward’s bankruptcy. It was a wide-ranging discussion to build shared awareness and rapport as both the cities and Brown University Health, new to Massachusetts, seek to pick up the pieces from Steward’s disgraceful collapse and provide quality care to southeastern Massachusetts.
Award for supporting medical research: I was honored to receive the Government Leader award from the Massachusetts Society for Medical Research. Previous recipients include Governor Deval Patrick. In my remarks to the Society, I highlighted the importance of more federal funding for basic research, which has declined in real dollars in the last two decades. I also emphasized my commitment to strong intellectual property protection for novel innovation, and to health insurance reform that ensures first-dollar coverage for medicines.
Healthcare conversation with Mass General Hospital researchers: The 10-mile radius around Massachusetts General Hospital is the most productive biomedical cluster in the world. Much of that creativity and enterprise is owed to the physician-scientists who see patients and conduct research at MGH and its neighboring academic medical centers. I was honored and excited, therefore, to speak at Grand Rounds in front of the doctors, nurses, and researchers of the MGH Cancer Center.
The conversation was one of the best I’ve had about healthcare: we discussed prior authorization & payer-provider tension; drug-pricing reform & 340B; the role of private equity in health care; cybersecurity & AI; social determinants of health; and more. Representing a district with so many healthcare heavyweights is one of the most fun parts of my job, and I’m grateful to MGH for hosting this ‘take your congressman to work’ day.
STEM fundamentals at Robbins preschool: I visited Robbins Children's STEM Preschool to see firsthand how they are introducing STEM to our youngest learners. As the co-chair of the Massachusetts STEM Advisory Council, and a parent to three children under 5 years old, I'm grateful to the early educators who are setting up our children for success. In my conversation with Robbins' leadership & teachers, I learned more about how direct-to-provider grants – which started as federal policy during COVID and is now sustained by the state – support their operations, how they are handling socioemotional education, and some of the methods they use for STEM instruction.
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The human toll of lax gun laws: More than 800 Americans a week die from gun violence. That is not a fact of life – it’s a fact of policy. That policy can, and must, change. I visited the Gun Violence Memorial Project at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston to reflect on the human toll of lax gun laws. The Project allows families to share artifacts & memories from loved ones lost to gun violence.
As a bright ending to this somber event, I toured the ICA with its director and curator to learn more about this remarkable Institute and the value it creates for visitors, artists, and Greater Boston.
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Sukkot with Temple Aliyah: Temple Aliyah was gracious enough to invite my daughters, Grace & Audrey, and me to their sukkah to join in their children’s song & instruction about the Jewish harvest holiday. I then spoke to the elementary and middle-schoolers about how government works and the policy issues of the day. |