PRIORITIES

Success as your Assemblymember is not about pointing fingers or making headline-catching speeches. It is about listening to you and finding solutions to complex problems.

Today’s challenges do not fit neatly into outdated political silos. Steve is a Democrat who believes in providing new world solutions while retaining our progressive values:

We must address the climate crisis in order to strengthen our local economy.
Addressing mental health is critical to improving educational outcomes for our students.
Attracting and retaining great teachers requires access to affordable housing.
We need to enact new policies that support communities of color, address historical inequities, and embrace California’s diversity.

In the State Assembly, Steve will seek out multiple community perspectives to find and support the kind of creative solutions that Sonoma and Marin Counties are known for.

EDUCATION & YOUTH

As a school Board Member and President, Steve fought for equity for students and to ensure teachers received excellent compensation and benefits. Steve recognizes the importance of investing ‘upstream’ in mental health counseling to identify students who need extra support to succeed. Steve understands that the many unique districts in the 10th Assembly District face different challenges than large urban districts like San Francisco and Los Angeles, and should be approached differently. He has seen firsthand how state bureaucrats can delay small school districts’ ability to move forward with modernization projects like energy retrofits and solar panels for years. He will work to streamline administrative reviews by avoiding one-size-fits-all policies. The son of a public school teacher, he has a lifelong value that every child deserves the opportunity to succeed in school. Steve is proud of his work as a community college adjunct professor, a religious school teacher, and a youth soccer coach for his daughters’ teams.

As your Assemblymember Steve will work to support the “whole child” including:

Fully funding our schools, including support for English Language Learners.
Attracting and supporting quality teachers.
Funding early childhood education.
Expanding student mental health screening and care.
Building robust education programs that include science, technology, art, and math.

AGRICULTURE & HEALTHY FOOD

Steve has dedicated most of his life’s work to building farmers’ skills, promoting sustainable agriculture, ensuring access to healthy food, and increasing access to conserved land, loans, and credit for small businesses, entrepreneurs, communities of color.

Steve founded the non-profit California FarmLink in 1998 with a vision of helping farmers get access to land and capital. As FarmLink’s Executive Director, he organized the first Individual Development Account program in the nation for farmers. This important equity investment program serving women, immigrant, and beginning farmers, became a model for other states to replicate, and a federally authorized program. Steve used his background in economics to develop a loan program for small-scale entrepreneurs who otherwise would not have access to loans by securing investments from foundations and banks. FarmLink’s loan program was the first non-profit loan program nationally in over 23 years to secure status as a USDA lender. Steve was honored to work with the California Reinvestment Coalition’s Board to pressure banks to invest in low-income communities and communities of color. This work led to Steve joining a handful of other non-profit community development leaders in a meeting at the Federal Reserve to advise then chairman Ben Bernanke.

For the 2013 and 2018 Farm Bills, Steve served as a consultant to the California Caucus of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. He worked to coordinate advocacy for 15 state-wide non-profit groups. As Chief of Staff to Assembly Agriculture Committee’s Vice-Chair Julie Bornstein, Schwartz led the development of legislation financing incentives for sustainable agriculture farming techniques creating the Biologically Integrated Farming Systems program that still provides grants to groups of California farmers today.

In 2012 Schwartz founded the Interfaith Sustainable Food Collaborative that has worked with over 400 faith-based groups and organic farmers to expand affordable access to local, farm-fresh products. His team has facilitated Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish congregations community gardens, and nutrition incentives for low-income families.

FOCUS ON SENIORS

At Interfaith Food Schwartz organized an innovative program to match Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program funding with 3 to 1 script/match incentives. He led a coalition in 2021 successfully advocating for the State of California to, for the first time, augment federal Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program dollars. This will increase the number of low-income seniors benefiting by 60% in 2022.

ENVIRONMENT & SUSTAINABILITY

Steve has a long-standing track record of working with land trusts to push the envelope on conservation easement designs that ensure land being conserved is actually farmed. Steve worked at the US Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, where he researched solutions to manage Superfund sites. As a Legislative staffer in 1997, he worked to secure funding for healthy fisheries, and successfully fought to fund the protection of an important redwood grove. Working for Assemblyman Phil Isenberg in 1991 he helped coordinate a coalition of environmental and conservation groups to get over 16,000 acres of northern California wetlands south of Sacramento protected with a National Wildlife Refuge designation. The innovative project includes significant holdings of both public and private lands. As a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand, he led tree planting projects in two villages. He loves kayaking in Tomales Bay and backpacking.

Steve will fight to invest California State dollars in programs for clean energy, to slow climate change, support our parks, reduce waste, and protect our coast.

THRIVING COMMUNITIES

Sonoma and Marin Counties are filled with unique towns and thriving communities. Steve knows the role local businesses, high-achieving public schools, festivals, and farmers markets play in a thriving community. Today we need to do even more and provide access to:

Housing for our teachers and public safety professionals.
Strong public transit that works with pedestrians and bicyclists creating safe routes to work and school.
Local jobs that come from small and medium-sized businesses locally owned.
Affordable health care and mental health prevention instead of waiting for expensive treatments for the acute problems that result.