Editor’s note: This story originally ran on Democracywise, an SU-based website with stories from political reporting students.

Before last spring, Ursula Rozum didn’t own a car. She traveled around Syracuse almost exclusively on her bicycle, made of a worn blue frame and pink handlebars.

“It’s good for your wallet, good for the planet and good for your body,” said Rozum.

Now Rozum cruises around the state in a beat-up pickup truck and a campaign sticker pokes between the spokes of her back bicycle tire. She is the Green Party candidate for New York’s 24th Congressional District.

Rozum, 28, faces U.S. Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle, R-Onondaga Hill, and Democratic challenger Dan Maffei of DeWitt in the 24th Congressional District race. Election day is Nov. 6.

The newly drawn 24th Congressional District includes all of Cayuga, Onondaga and Wayne counties, and part of Oswego County. Voter registration in the district gives her slim chances of victory. Of the 409,462 registered voters, 35 percent are Republicans and 34 percent are Democrats. The Green Party has 960 registered voters. About 23 percent of voters are unaffiliated with a party.

Rozum is also endorsed by the Socialist Party of New York.

Rozum has launched a grassroots campaign that she acknowledges is less focused on winning the hotly contested election and more focused on spreading Green Party ideals. Those who know Rozum well praise her as a good candidate because of her ability to relate to others and her down-to-earth nature. She is in touch with voters’ concerns because she has experienced many of them herself, say Rozum and supporters. For example, Rozum has been without health insurance for two years and has still has student loan debt.

Running for office, said Rozum, should be less of a career and more of a commitment. “It should be the kind of thing that you do because you have a sense of responsibility to your community,” Rozum said

In 2006, Rozum graduated from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, with a bachelor’s degree in political science and Latin American literature. In 2008, she moved back to Syracuse, where she was born and raised and joined the Syracuse Peace Council. In 2010, the Council hired Rozum as a staff coordinator. She’s now in charge of the organization’s outreach efforts, planning educational events and some fundraising.

In addition, she has been a volunteer with Meals on Wheels, the Detention Task Force for Immigrant Rights and the Workers’ Center of CNY.

Frank Cetera met Rozum nearly three years ago while working in the same building with her downtown. She was a passionate staff member at Americorp Vista then, he recalled, and he a small business developer. They’ve been together ever since.

This past summer, Cetera helped Rozum begin her grassroots campaign by taking a 130-mile bike trip through the 24th Congressional District. The couple stopped at farms, bars and national parks to meet residents and talk politics. They spent hours, both Rozum and Cetera recalled, chatting with the small Green Party base along Lake Ontario and attended all the cultural festivals they could find on the way back down to Syracuse.

Cetera attributes her campaign to altruism. “She has no ulterior motive for taking on this campaign, other than the fact that she believes in the mission of the Green Party platform and values, and the need to affect change in the current system as it is right now,” Cetera said.

Andrew Greco, her housemate, met Rozum through the Peace Council and later through the Occupy Syracuse movement. Rozum, he said, offers voters a choice other than the two major parties. That, he said, should make her especially appealing to younger voters.

“If students really care about these issues,” Greco said, “they have to go with a party that puts people and planet before profit.”

Rozum’s background includes a long list of left-leaning projects and groups. In 2009, she was the canvasser with Working Families Party and in 2010  the upstate campaign coordinator for Howie Hawkins, another Green Party member, during his run for governor. In March 2012, Rozum went to El Salvador with the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador to act as an elections observer.

She attributes some of her social and political activism to her parents. Her parents, Adam and Ewa Rozum, are Polish immigrants who moved to the U.S. in 1982. They were always politically outspoken in Poland and activists of their own right, Rozum said.

Her own political awakening happened, Rozum said, when she was in the 10th grade. In a world history class, she was assigned a paper on the Vietnam War and chose to write about Agent Orange, the chemical used to defoliate the thick jungles and which many veterans have blamed for debilitating illnesses.

She was utterly shocked by many soldiers’ reports of damage to their health even decades after exposure, Rozum said. “It opened to my eyes to the fact that U.S. policy isn’t always fair or just and doesn’t always value human life,” she said.

But, Rozum said, she’s also running because opponents Buerkle and Maffei are ignoring young people’s major issues: the economy and climate change.

“I was looking at my opponents and thinking ‘Where are the solutions? Why isn’t anyone addressing this concept of inequality, and unemployment and debt and climate change?’ Because I think it’s something that worries a lot of people, at least in our generation,” she said.

As part of her economic platform, Rozum supports what the Green Party calls a “Green New Deal,” similar to the massive public works projects created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to help pull the country out of the Great Depression. For example, she calls for creating new jobs through developing alternative, renewable energy sources.

Rozum also supports:

• Legalizing marijuana
• Creating a tax-supported health care system, like Canada, in which the government pays the medial bills like an insurance company
• Cutting military spending
• Outlawing the use of unmanned aircraft called “drones” that have been blamed for civilian casualties in Afghanistan and other areas of conflict.

Political analysts have estimated that Rozum will win about seven percent of the vote, which could affect the outcome of the fierce rematch between Buerkle and Maffei. Buerkle and Rozum have agreed to a series of town hall meetings without opponent Maffei. The first was Oct. 10 in Oswego County.

In her campaign for the 24th Congressional District, Rozum cites her everyday personal experiences as valuable assets in this race. Voters sometimes discount those experiences as qualifications, she said.

“There’s a perception that a political leader needs to have all these degrees and be lawyers,” Rozum said. “But I think it’s really important for people who represent the community to actually know what people are experiencing.”

Published on October 17, 2012 at 3:01 am

Contact Liz: egsawyer@syr.edu | @3sawyer