Shanna talks to Jennifer Esteen, candidate for California Assembly District 20 about her platform unpinned by behavioral health care, affordable housing, and fully funded public education. Jennifer shares her personal experience with student debt and how she got some of her private student loans discharged through bankruptcy, a seemingly impossible feat!

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Transcript:

[00:00:05] Shanna Bennett: Hi, I’m Shanna Bennett, and I’m with Jennifer Esteen. A registered nurse, mom, and candidate for California Assembly in AD 20. And you’re on Matter of Life and Debt. Welcome to the podcast!

[00:00:22] Jennifer Esteen: Hey, thank you for having me!

[00:00:24] Shanna Bennett: Hey, welcome. So I’m really excited to have you here and chat with you. I believe that Nikki met you at an event because you are running for California General Assembly. Can you tell us a little bit about your platform?

[00:00:41] Jennifer Esteen: I’m a registered nurse. I happened to be a psychiatric registered nurse and a public health nurse. So, expanding behavioral health care is core to my values.

[00:00:50] I became a nurse after my struggle with debt. Not even a struggle, like I was overcome. I was a single mom.

[00:00:56] I was divorced. My kids were three and seven and the financial crisis hit from 2007/2008. I was a real estate agent and I was a notary and I was studying to become an appraiser because you got to wear three hats. If you want to raise two kids by yourself in the Bay, you know, you just got to hustle.

[00:01:12] And so the market fell out and I was like, okay, now that I’ve lost everything, are we going to be homeless and not be able to eat? Or am I going to feed my kids every day? And I started paying all my bills on credit cards. I was like, I’m going to keep paying those bills. And keep racking up credit card debt.

[00:01:28] Like it was just this horrible thing, but that’s how I ended up going to nursing school. I went to a one-year program. It was a private college, it was accelerated. And I came out the other end a registered nurse, which was perfect. But in the meantime, I was in the middle of a financial crisis.

[00:01:44] And so I had like $125,000 student loan on top of the mortgage debt and all this credit card debt, because I was trying to finance my life, on credit card debt. Which is kind of ridiculous, but so many of us do it. And I was on food stamps. I mean, it was wild.

[00:02:01] So, a part of my platform for expanding behavioral health care includes making sure that people can get their education to become behavioral health providers for free or at the very least, with student loan forgiveness. And then also living wage jobs, once they are finished with their schooling. Because when people work in behavioral health care, I’m a nurse so I didn’t have an internship, but if you’re a PhD psychologist, a master’s prepared social worker or a marriage and family therapist, there’s this way you have to get like 3000 hours of training.

[00:02:36] Some of it is posting your completion. Some of it is like in the middle, but internships for 3000 hours. And usually, that’s either unpaid or very, very low paid. It’s not attractive.

[00:02:47] And if we can tackle behavioral health care. Especially the way I want to do it holistically, then we can not only educate a bunch of people, but we can also start providing care. We can get people out of the jails. In order to really provide care, you have to have housing. So now we’re talking about carceral justice, education justice, and criminal justice reform, all at the same time when we just started talking about providing mental health care, which is a basic right.

[00:03:12] So, that’s the core of my platform. There’s an ecosystem in the world and I operate in a way that addresses all of it. I think sometimes we call it intersectionality and you know, that’s what it is. It’s about life as a whole.

[00:03:24] Shanna Bennett: And I think to fully understand those issues, you do have to understand that it is all interconnected. It absolutely is. Circling back to a few things you said, someone who’s hard-working, who’s working, three jobs. Those who want to propel themselves further or at least navigate through a difficult situation should be able to educate themselves, without accumulating so much debt.

[00:03:47] Jennifer Esteen: One would think.

[00:03:48] Shanna Bennett: It doesn’t make any sense. And I think it’s really unfortunate.

[00:03:51] Jennifer Esteen: I do too. And I think that as a black woman, as a child coming up, we were always told you have to educate yourself out of poverty. You have to educate yourself into the middle class or to remain in the middle class. And so black women are the most technically educated through college.

[00:04:04] We were talking about this weekend and as a result, black women are the most debt-burdened with student loan debt. I kind of heard something like that years ago when they said Oprah’s Book Club would create bestsellers because black women are the most well-read.

[00:04:17] I didn’t know that that was coupled with student loan debt. I think as we talk about equity and justice, it’s knowing that that was the ethic established in our community. I think it raises two questions for me. Number one, why do we have so many black men in prison? And we know that that’s because of structural racism and if women could be educated in that way, then we know the men were going to follow suit as well.

[00:04:38] And so the war on drugs and all that, that has attacked our communities. And then the second thing is, the educational system. If black women are the most educated and black men are stuck in prison, why do we have black students with the worst outcome in our educational system these days? And I think we see a massive disinvestment and resegmentation of our classrooms that really creates these poor outcomes because the system is designed to continue apartheid in America and in places all across the world where colonialism has touched.

[00:05:07] Shanna Bennett: Say it all. I think one of the things is back to how educated, black women are and yet how indebted they are. One of the frustrating things with that is we’re holding up communities. So those same communities that you’re talking about here, a lot of times, we’re the ones that are holding them up. Holding them together.

[00:05:24] And so when we talk about debt forgiveness, specifically for this group, we’re talking about massively affecting these communities and it’s so interesting. When we talk about debt forgiveness, people want to talk about how lazy we are because we’re not talking about debt forgiveness, and we’re talking about a system that’s really not functioning.

[00:05:41] But then when you have these one-on-one conversations, you’re hearing that someone is working two, three jobs. They’re supporting a family, they’re putting themselves through school. So who’s lazy?

Jennifer Esteen: That’s the perpetuation of the colonial master myth that the person who, you know, I’m sitting here on my recliner with my feet on your back after you just finished cooking and cleaning and working for me all day, but you’re lazy. That’s just a mind game. And we have to really unlearn all of that.

[00:06:06] The messaging that comes to us, you know, the individualistic, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And if you’re not the exceptional person who can overcome all of that, then it’s your fault.

[00:06:16] But really the system is set up to make us fail.

[00:06:18] Shanna Bennett: Oh yeah.

[00:06:19] I was going to say, I liked that you highlighted the internship portion. I think it highlights the fact that, again, it’s not as simple as you took out a student loan, just pay it back. No, some of these programs require us to have internships that are very low paying. And some of these programs prefer that we actually not work.

[00:06:37] In fact, in some of these programs, you can’t work while you’re in them. You have to fund living expenses somehow. I think that’s unfortunate as well.

[00:06:45] Jennifer Esteen: Yeah. When I was starting nursing school, they scared us. They were like, this is going to be such an intense program. You cannot work. I was like, you can’t work? How do you tell somebody you can’t work? They’re like, you’re not going to be able to handle it, but you know, how do you know? And that’s the pressure that we were put under.

[00:07:00] Shanna Bennett: So we’ve touched on your platform. Which makes us ask, why run? It’s a little redundant, cause I think you’ve touched on what you’re passionate about, but, why join this race? Why run for this position?

[00:07:11] Jennifer Esteen: So many reasons. It started with the ultimate burden. I wasn’t an organizer in any way, shape, or form. But being a psych nurse, I was working with people who had been formerly unhoused or were actively homeless, at various places in their life with substance abuse. Some of my clients have been really fortunate and were able to get housed and had permanent housing.

[00:07:37] And what’s called a boarding care home. And these are people who had severe and persistent mental illness. Who needed help, they couldn’t pay bills, they needed somebody to cook their food. They needed somebody to wash their clothes and give them their meds every single day. you know, people with real disabilities. And to be permanently housed is a godsend. But they were going to lose their housing. And they were losing their housing because of a policy decision. We need more shelter beds, but we also need more permanent housing.

[00:08:03] And so when I found out that my client’s permanent housing was going to be taken away specifically because the license was going to be repurposed to open a homeless shelter. I was like, this doesn’t make sense. Why would we close permanent housing to open temporary shelter beds in order to address people in need?

[00:08:22] Like, all you’re going to do is make my clients go into the shelter. And I started a huge fight, a huge protest to prevent the closure of those beds. And when we won people were like, huh that was pretty cool. We not only won by preventing the closure of those beds, we did it fast. Like in three months we got legislation passed in the city of San Francisco.

[00:08:43] And the real trick is that the person who was going to benefit from opening those homeless shelter beds was the person who got to put a headline up, that said new homeless shelter beds opened. We’re solving the homelessness crisis. So we beat the officials. I’m trying to be real politically correct here y’all. We beat the officials that were trying to get a headline. And in the process, we’re going to displace people. And to have that kind of victory, people started noticing, and the activist was born. After that I helped to write legislation that literally expanded mental health care in San Francisco and was funded.

[00:09:21] That expansion was funded, this is the best part, by taxing the rich. We established a CEO income tax on the excessive income between the lowest paid worker and the highest paid worker. And I was like, whoa, we just tax the rich to help pay for care for the people who have the least, amazing. Talk about taking the system.

[00:09:42] So that was the moment when I was like oh, my god, organizing is a thing and we can win big things. We can win some really big victories by organizing. And then, COVID happened, the summer of George Floyd happened, and all of that propelled me into knowing we have power. The system doesn’t just have to do things to us.

[00:10:02] We can affect change and take the bull by the horns. Really when we stand together, we can win. So we have folks that listen, who are considering becoming more active, especially, in the student debt cancellation cause.

[00:10:18] Shanna Bennett: So looking back at when this activist was born for you. What was the most helpful thing, or how did you get started?

[00:10:26] What’s the first thing that you did in terms of connecting people and kind of moving things along?

[00:10:31] Jennifer Esteen: You know, organizing is a very slow process. And I think it can also be pretty painful. What was easy was getting started. I knew something was wrong and I was just like, let’s go. The hard part was sustaining. Because sometimes you are going to work full time.

[00:10:48] You have these meetings at eight or nine o’clock at night, and sometimes they get derailed. It’s difficult. And weeks and weeks go by and it feels like nothing is happening. And so it can be pretty discouraging. The part that keeps me going is being in community with folks because we start to build relationships. And counting every little victory. Because I think organizing, because it can be a time-consuming painstaking process, you have to really celebrate each victory. So there was this one night, like we were having a worker meeting before we were able to save my client’s beds. And we had three of the most powerful people in the city sitting in our room.

[00:11:31] It was ten of us workers and three members of the Board of Supervisors. They were sitting there yelling at each other. And I was like, wow, I think we just tapped on something. We hit something hot. If these people are here and they almost outnumber us and that was a victory, but it was still, you know, into the struggle.

[00:11:49] One of the things that we’re doing right now in our campaign is trying to have the most positive outlook possible. And so we did things like we got together a few weeks ago and had a comedy show. So we got together and laughed and it was so joyful. It was just beautiful.

[00:12:03] And I think it’s just, it’s like making community, celebrating every small victory, keeping the most positive attitude you possibly can and supporting one another, like folks who have children, sometimes you can’t be at every meeting.

[00:12:16] So tapping out and holding space for folks with compassion. Because, as much as I want every person to show up every time, that’s unrealistic and we have to be able to give each other grace.

[00:12:28] Shanna Bennett: I totally agree. So circling back again, in terms of educating, black and brown women, educating women, I just want to highlight again, the point that we are holding up communities. You’re someone that propelled yourself to a certain place for using your education and then turned around and helped your community.

[00:12:49] This is what we’re talking about. These aren’t lazy people and just to listen to the effect and the change that you’ve had is amazing.

[00:12:57] There’s another point I wanted to make. I think you used the term unhoused. Is that the term for homelessness or for homeless people?

[00:13:04] Jennifer Esteen: We think about a house and we think about a home. People say home is where the heart is. Sometimes people are sleeping in their cars. Sometimes people are sleeping in campers on the streets. Sometimes people are sleeping in tents, sometimes they’re couch surfing.

[00:13:17] And it could be considered semantics but how do we talk about things in a way that continues to hold on to people’s humanity? Folks have homes, but they don’t have a house. They don’t have a roof over their head. They don’t have permanent shelter. They don’t have dignified housing.

[00:13:34] Shanna Bennett: Thank you for sharing that. I’ve seen that term more and more, so it’s good to know.

[00:13:37] So back to student debt, how has student debt affected your life?

[00:13:42] Jennifer Esteen: Oh, wait. I mean I started as an undergrad. I made a choice and actually my son is 17. He’s about to graduate from high school and he said to me just yesterday “I don’t want to go because I don’t want debt”. And it’s like that kind of decision-making led me as an undergrad to live at home with my parents instead of on campus. And commute instead of going away. And I think the experience that we have as young people, when we are able to go to college and live in a dorm and bond with our classmates and have the freshmen experience, which is whatever it is, that is a certain level of growth that comes from being newly independent and traversing that kind of life.

[00:14:29] And one thing I always said is that I wanted my kids to be able to go to college and have that experience where they could live on campus and have the experience. And I told my son, I please don’t think about debt. Don’t let that stop you. We have to be able to just say yes to all of it.

[00:14:44] And I know how many organizers are pushing. I know that Debt Collective is working hard. I know every single day people are going to lean on our President and Vice-President to have the promise made kept. To eliminate student debt. And you know, when I get elected, it is going to be one of my missions to make education free. Starting with universal childcare, universal pre-K, fully funding our public educational system and making sure people can get access to free undergraduate and graduate programs.

[00:15:17] There’s no reason people should pay for anything. When my mom went to nursing school in the late sixties, she got paid a stipend. A hundred dollars a semester. So that she could go to nursing school.

[00:15:31] Shanna Bennett: Amazing.

[00:15:32] Jennifer Esteen: We have turned things completely upside down because of capitalism and profit seeking motives.

[00:15:38] Shanna Bennett: It’s really unfortunate. I wish that you were running in Ohio.

[00:15:45] Jennifer Esteen: Me and Nina.

[00:15:47] Shanna Bennett: Yes. Yes. I have Nina over here exactly. Let’s get into the really, really juicy question that I’ve been looking forward to asking you. So, in speaking with Nikki and in doing our background research, I learned that you navigated this bankruptcy process and that in the process had some private loans discharged? Is that true?

[00:16:13] Jennifer Esteen: I did. That is the truth, student loans disappear. Okay. So, and, and I’m super embarrassed because I was in a bad place. I was in a super bad place. Single. Two little kids. Putting myself through nursing school. Foreclosure. Bankruptcy. And it was through the bankruptcy process that I started to do afternoons, like a study session in the law library. The public law library in Hayward, not too far from where I live now. Actually we launched a bunch of canvases from the playground across the street from the law library. I’m like, boy, have I come a long way? But I sat in that law library and did research and I had no idea what I was doing, but you know, it’s a book, right?

[00:16:58] You look up the index and I found bankruptcy. I wasn’t quite sure what it is that I needed to know. but there was this case, where there was a woman who had a disability, who had kids. She was a single parent. I think she was a woman of color.

[00:17:13] And she was the only documented case that I could find where a student loan bankruptcy resulted in a discharge. And I made copies and manila folders and I was ready and I went to my negotiated settlement hearing in this fancy-ass corner office, window building overlooking the bay bridge and just, I was like in the worst place of my life, so embarrassed.

[00:17:42] I was so ashamed at filing bankruptcy. And felt like it was all my fault. And here I am with these lawyers and they bring me in to their conference room with their big table and fancy chairs. They’re like, would you like some water? Yes. I want some water. I was like, you’re going to give me some water, at least get a bottle of water out of you.

[00:18:02] And there’s this man and this woman, they’re all wearing fancy suits. And we sit down around the table and they have a telephone going with some other person. And there’s this negotiation that started to happen. And I had my little envelope closed and was nervous as hell.

[00:18:17] And they were like, well, you owe us $125,000. And this was my student loan from my nursing program. My one-year accelerated private school nursing program because I had to go to this private school because all of the community colleges that also offered nursing were full. And had waitlists. And so if I wanted to become a nurse in the time allowed before I would completely be homeless, I had to choose a private college that was expensive.

[00:18:47] And that required me to take out a super big student loan. So the options continue to narrow until you’re forced into debt. And so I sat there with them and $25,000 was just penalties and fees. And the student loan was $99,000. And now I’m up to $125,000. I owed them because I couldn’t pay for who knows how long.

[00:19:07] We went back and forth a little bit and they were like, well, what would make sense for you? And I was like, well, I don’t want to pay anything back. And they were like, oh, that’s not going to happen little lady.

[00:19:17] And then, we kind of went back and forth and I was like, well, what if my payment was $200 a month? And I’m thinking, that’ll never happen. And they were like, we can do that. They can do that. And they took $50,000 off the top. Boom, we’re going to drop your loan amount to $75,000. This is the trick we’re going to make it 30 years. You’re going to be paying this for 30 years. I think when I was sitting at that table, I was 30 years old.

[00:19:43] So I was like, oh, I get to pay my whole lifetime.

[00:19:45] Shanna Bennett: Yes. So exciting.

[00:19:48] Jennifer Esteen: Oh my god.

[00:19:49] Shanna Bennett: Oh my god.

[00:19:50] Jennifer Esteen: The one good thing that happened, they were like, we’re going to give you 0% interest.

[00:19:56] Shanna Bennett: Whoa.

[00:19:57] Jennifer Esteen: Okay. 0% interest. I’m paying the principal. So I sat there and they left the room and I was like, huh, what do I do? And I think I tried to call somebody, but the service was bad.

[00:20:10] And I was like, oh my god, what should I do? You know, I’m sitting there all by myself.

[00:20:14] Shanna Bennett: Wait, time out. Did you not have any kind of representation?

[00:20:18] Jennifer Esteen: Girl what’s that? That cost money.

[00:20:21] Shanna Bennett: So, okay. Cause that’s what I thought, but I’m thinking maybe you just had a very quiet attorney. So one more time, if you’re just tuning in an educated black woman-

[00:20:33] Jennifer Esteen: Yeah. Yup.

[00:20:35] Shanna Bennett: -studied some law books. Went in.

[00:20:38] Jennifer Esteen: By myself.

[00:20:39] Shanna Bennett: Uh, by herself, this is why this is why we educate. And you represented yourself in a bankruptcy hearing. And negotiated on your own behalf. Wow. Okay.

[00:20:53] Jennifer Esteen: And I could have done better. I probably could have got it completely wiped out or even lower, but they kind of stunned me with 0% interest and $200 a month. I was like, I could pay $200 a month forever.

[00:21:07] If I had opened that envelope and shown them the research I did, I never opened the envelope.

[00:21:13] I never showed it to them. Guys, this is how intimidated I was. The Jennifer you were talking to today who was running for office, who was like, I’m taking no shit from nobody. And I’m going to fight the strongest people in town. That was not me then. I was at a very low point. I had not found my voice.

[00:21:31] I had no lawyer. I was by myself and it was a tough process. And I think that that’s actually the experience most people have. We are intimidated. We are outgunned. We are unprepared and lawyers are expensive and what are we going to do? We’re going to get stuff done to us. We’re going to be taken advantage of. And even those of us who are educated who might, you know, technically quote-unquote, know better. We don’t know better. We don’t know better. We got centuries of knowing better piled on top of us. The odds are stacked against us.

[00:22:09] Shanna Bennett: Absolutely. And I think too, one of the frustrating things, when we talk about getting bankruptcy protections for student debt, sometimes the thinking is, well, then everyone will just file bankruptcy. It’s actually like, no, no one wants to file bankruptcy. It’s not an enjoyable experience.

[00:22:29] It’s an option that we should have if we’re going to have proper consumer protections in place for this kind of financing. But no, it’s not enjoyable. And even hearing you talk about it, you can hear the shame that you had then.

Jennifer Esteen: I was full of shame. It was like filing for bankruptcy was the last, last, last resort. I mean, I was racking up credit card debt because I was like, I can make it through nursing school and I can get a job and I can pay all of this. I gave myself an extra hundred thousand dollars of debt. Oh my god, just trying to keep paying for everything. And you know, the one, this is funny because I think people forget. The person who inspired me to think that bankruptcy would be okay, you guys are gonna laugh at this because this is years ago was Donald Trump.

[00:23:14] Shanna Bennett: Yes…

[00:23:15] Jennifer Esteen: I don’t know if y’all remember, but I remember Donald Trump filed bankruptcy as many times as he ran for president. He filed for bankruptcy five times.

[00:23:23] Shanna Bennett: Yes.

[00:23:24] Jennifer Esteen: So I was like, you know what? And this is way before he had any credible run for president. But I was like, if this guy is on TV with the board game, we all know Trump, if he could do it and recover, I can do it and recover. And so I was like, come on, you got this, you can make it.

[00:23:41] And you know, it was incredibly awful. And so I talk about it as a part of who I am today because I also feel like it could be weaponized and used against me if I didn’t lead with you know what I did file bankruptcy. I did have a foreclosure. Someone else would say, Jennifer, you’re not a good fiscal steward because you filed bankruptcy.

[00:24:03] You were irresponsible with your own funds. Why should we trust you with the funds of the state of California?

[00:24:07] Shanna Bennett: Right. Right. I think as activists in the student debt space, that’s a criticism that we receive as well. Right, it’s your debt. You know, I tell people I have $133,000 in student loans. It’s like, whoa, how irresponsible were you? This and that. What we’re trying to highlight is a system.

[00:24:27] It’s a faulty system. and that at least within student debt, That’s 44/45 million Americans, and that’s a number that matters. Right?

Jennifer Esteen: It makes me think about the amount of people who absolutely get educated and are considered well off. I mean, I just was reading Michelle Obama’s book. She was paying her student loans until Barack got elected.

[00:24:48] Doctors are sometimes struggling to figure out how to make ends meet for the first 10 years of their career, because they have half a million dollars in student loans.

[00:24:58] You know, like we are harming our society by forcing people into debt.

[00:25:03] Shanna Bennett: Why would we want to burden our most educated citizens? And in talking to more and more people with student debt, I’ve literally heard people say, I want to make the world a better place. People are wanting to get educated. They want to, you know, build up their communities. They want to make the world a better place. And we’re basically saying here, take a couple of hundreds, thousands of debt. It’s not helpful.

[00:25:26] Something about your story though, listening to I’m assuming maybe bankers, maybe whoever you were meeting with, just remove $50K of your debt like it was nothing, there is something that is so monopoly money about that. Like it’s not even real. it’s nothing to them. Meanwhile, it’s affecting your entire life. It’s nothing to them.

[00:25:47] We were having a conversation earlier about how sometimes when you approach the government, needing certain things to be improved, the response we get is, well, there’s not enough money. Then we watch our government misspend and misuse, how many millions and trillions of dollars. There is money.

[00:26:08] It’s our money. We’ve given it to you. We know you have it, give it back to us. It’s just, it’s wild to me. Yeah.

[00:26:16] Jennifer Esteen: Or at least spend it on us.

[00:26:17] Shanna Bennett: Exactly.

[00:26:18] Jennifer Esteen: The amount of money that was sent to fight a war for the last 20 years and another war that is happening right now, like war, is atrocious and should never happen. And our federal budget is 50% military. And in most cities around this country, police budgets are 50% of the spending.

[00:26:36] Shanna Bennett: It’s wild. I don’t know if you saw, but Biden hinted at a wide-scale student debt cancellation. It was reported that in the next few weeks, he’s going to be saying something or making some kind of change.

[00:26:48] But then he alluded to the fact that it won’t be $50K in wide-scale student debt canceled. Do you have any thoughts on that?

[00:26:56] Jennifer Esteen: I think it all needs to go with no limit. With no cap. Because I imagine that what our government is going to do is what it usually does. A corporate giveaway. Those of us who owe, I mean, some of these loans are private. Some of these loans are federal. And so if the federal government says we’re wiping out all federal loans, I’m for it.

[00:27:18] But for those other loans that are either being serviced by some other provider, like those people are going to get money. The private loans, those people are going to get money. So it’s another corporate giveaway. You know, it’s that monopoly money thing we talked about, our federal government gives corporations, monopoly money all the time.

[00:27:36] All the time. But I hope it goes, cause my wife has about $140,000 or $150,000 of student loans. And she wants to become a psychoanalyst. And in order to become a psychoanalyst, she has to be able to lay on the couch five days a week to be analyzed. And she has to have supervisors. Three. One for each client over the next five years.

[00:28:00] And it’s like, no wonder only white people are psychoanalysts, you know? And then there’s this other thing that happens in the educational system, where if you want higher education, you can only attain it if you have wealth. Or if you take on more debt. Because like we were talking about earlier, you can’t work because it’s just not possible.

[00:28:19] If you have to write a dissertation and go to work full time, that’s a tough choice.

[00:28:24] Right, that plays into why black women are in this, most educated block of US citizens. I think it’s because we keep going for advanced degrees. We don’t usually stop. We usually are continuing to educate ourselves. and I think the irony is growing up we’re told that education is this good investment, invest in yourself. But if education is such a good investment then investing in us. Wipe out the $1.8 trillion in student debt.

[00:28:50] Jennifer Esteen: There we go.

[00:28:50] Shanna Bennett: So we can move on.

[00:28:51] Jennifer Esteen: And it’s insulting sometimes. You get that education. And then when you go to get a real job, what it does for you is then you can be employable. Yet we still see certain sectors that are mostly white and mostly male. And you see things like what happened with Ketanji Brown Jackson, where she was more qualified than anybody who preceded her.

[00:29:13] She got grilled. More, more black women were surprised, more qualified. And so, you know, it’s like, even though all of that sacrifice, cost, expense, the burden is still not good enough. Because ultimately it’s the system I think, is not qualify us based on our education and our expertise. It’s qualifying us based on our race and gender.

[00:29:37] Shanna Bennett: And something to what you said before about, just you alluded to having representation in certain spaces, especially in mental health. That’s so important. And I’ve had, I should say I’ve heard, friends of mine remark at how difficult sometimes it is to find a therapist that looks like them and how important that is.

[00:29:57] And if a barrier to that is the cost of higher ed or the cost of training. I think that’s really unfortunate.

[00:30:02] Jennifer Esteen: Right. And I think then there’s the secondary barrier where for behavioral health, this is really special because our insurance companies don’t provide the same level of care when it comes to behavioral health care. Like medical care, you get coverage for whatever it is, but for behavioral health care, it’s often carved out so to speak of policies and plans, or the coverage is so low.

[00:30:27] Like there’s this word that’s used called parity. Behavioral health parity does not exist. It’s not one for one with medical care. So often we’ll see that there are fewer providers in the private system and patients end up having to go out and they’re paying cash for behavioral health care treatment.

[00:30:43] Even though they have insurance, they pay premiums every month. Their employer pays a premium. If they want behavioral health care that is either culturally competent or just available for a weekly session, they have to go and pay for it out of pocket.

[00:30:57] After we tackle student loan debt, universal health care is next. Universal behavioral health care is next.

[00:31:03] Shanna Bennett: Absolutely. Thank you for making that point. I think I’ve seen where mental health care behavioral care has been carved out, my nine to five is in human resources. And so I’m administering a lot of our systems and our policies.

[00:31:14] Even after getting divorced a couple of years ago, I was paying kind of out of pocket. I was using my FSA funds to pay for counseling. It’d be nice to have a little bit more coverage for that. And also I’ve had people come to me wanting behavioral health services or mental health services and me not having resources. Or places to point people to outside of benefits. And so I had to push for us to get an EAP. Employer assistance program or something, or employee assistance program, to give free and confidential access to therapy, counseling, marital counseling, and even has things like counseling, estate planning, all that good stuff. It gives folks just a couple sessions. Just a foot in the door to help handle some things. But thank you for highlighting that. You know, that’s a nationwide problem. And it’s a problem for our young people. It’s a problem for students who are in high school, for people in college, we don’t have enough behavioral health care. And I think, just like we have stigma as it relates to debt and student loan debt, we have a stigma as it relates to the stress that comes from debt.

[00:32:19] Shanna Bennett: Yes. We had a guest a couple episodes ago. I’m, what am I? 36, 37. I think maybe she’s in her mid-twenties. She was talking about how her friends are still carrying a lot of shame around student debt, which shocked me. Because having worked with Nikki now for some time, and having talked to some people that have worked through their shame, I forgot there are still people that are feeling a lot of shame around their debt and how they got there.

[00:32:45] And that’s why I love that the Debt Collective, you know, one of their phrases is you are not alone. As in, you are not singular and alone, but you’re also not the sum of the loans that you carry.

Jennifer Esteen: I love that.

[00:32:55] Shanna Bennett: Yeah, me too. It’s good messaging.

[00:32:57] So what would you say to your younger self? Or how would you advise your younger self regarding, for example, student debt?

[00:33:03] Jennifer Esteen: Don’t be afraid of it, use it as a tool. And if you pay it off, you pay it off. And if you don’t, you don’t. Just carry on the same stuff that I’m telling my son. I let him know that some loans are guaranteed by him and some loans are guaranteed by me as a parent. I’m here.

[00:33:19] My family is fortunate in that I am here with him and I can support him and I can make sure that he is not burdened and alone.

[00:33:28] But, some of us don’t have families that look the same kind of way. And take my younger self and to anyone who’s facing the issues around debt, just take a deep breath and take whatever it is that you need to get you to the place you’re trying to go.

[00:33:44] And while you’re in school, you don’t have to pay. So use it, use it. If it means that you can take a $10,000 extra loan and not work for the semester or not work for the year, actually that’s a benefit because then you can be a better student. You can finish your degree anyway.

[00:34:03] Especially because we’re going to win. You know, like I just got finished visiting with some college seniors at San Francisco State. And I was telling them that sometimes we have to be delusional, which might sound ridiculous but it’s delusional to think that I was going to save my clients from being evicted after the notice was posted on their door. It’s delusional to think that I could challenge the most powerful people in the wealthiest city in the country and win. But I did.

[00:34:32] It’s delusional to think that I was going to overcome bankruptcy, take care of my children, put myself through nursing school, and come out on the other side an activist.

[00:34:42] Run for state assembly. Challenge an old white man incumbent who, before we even got to the filing period, retired. It’s delusional to think that I could run a corporate free campaign and talk to thousands of people who were supporting me. Raise $375,000 corporate free. It’s delusional to think that we can cancel student loan debt, but we will not give up because it is possible. It was delusional to think we could get out of slavery.

[00:35:19] We got that. It was delusional to think we could vote. We got that. It was delusional to think we would sit in the front of a bus. We got that too.

[00:35:28] Shanna Bennett: You’re absolutely right. I think too, just highlighting the shame again and the stress of the debt. I think people who are feeling shame and are feeling stress and worry about their debt.

[00:35:39] These are not, again, these are not lazy people. These are very responsible people that understand how systems work. We understand that there are services and we pay for services. What we’re highlighting is a system that is broken, that has left a lot of people indebted.

[00:35:52] There are people that have paid more than they’ve taken out and due to interest, they’re still indebted. We have servicers who are mismanaging funds, who are pushing borrowers into forbearance instead of income driven repayment plans. It’s unreal. And so it’s just not a cut and dry situation, for folks that might think that it is.

[00:36:13] So thank you again for highlighting this and we’re on the other end fighting for debt cancellation and we’re going to win.

[00:36:21] Jennifer Esteen: Yes.

Shanna Bennett: Anything else you want to add? I want to leave enough time for you to add anything you’d like and, or promote anything that you’d like.

[00:36:29] Jennifer Esteen: I appreciate this opportunity. Thank you so much for having me. This has been a fun conversation. and you know, I would love for people to check out what I’m doing at JenniferEsteen.com. I’m on social media at @Esteen4CA. That’s the number four, that’s on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook.

[00:36:48] And if folks are interested in getting involved In efforts to wipe out debt collection. In efforts to get this queer black mama elected. In efforts to be delusional and fight back systems of oppression, like come on down because we need you.

[00:37:04] You know, we are phone banking every Tuesday and every Wednesday, please join us. You can sign up on my website. Again that’s JenniferEsteen.com.. We’d love to have you. We’ve got support from people all over the country. So you’ll be in good company and every phone bank includes training and we believe in the philosophy that everything is awesome. You know, if somebody answers the phone and they’re like, oh, I only have a minute. You go, well, actually that’s perfect because this will only take a minute for me to tell you how awesome Jennifer is.

[00:37:36] Shanna Bennett: I love that, I love that.

[00:37:41] Jennifer Esteen: It was a little piece of our training.

[00:37:42] Shanna Bennett: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. Jennifer, it has been a pleasure. You are a powerhouse. Even just listening to you has motivated us to just get more active. I love the story of how an activist was born in you. I think only good things are coming for you. I’m very excited. I think California has someone awesome representing some folks that are often forgotten.

[00:38:08] Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for your time. Come back, come after you win. Don’t forget about the small guys. Come on.

[00:38:17] Jennifer Esteen: Thank you. Shannon. I’d love to come back. This is great. And I am excited to celebrate debt cancellation.

[00:38:24] Shanna Bennett: Yes.

[00:38:25] Jennifer Esteen: Because we will win.

[00:38:27] Shanna Bennett: Absolutely.

[00:38:30] If you liked this episode of Matter of Life and Debt, subscribe and share it with a friend. It really helps people discover us. Matter of Life and Debt is hosted by me. Shannon. It is produced by Shannon Bennett, Emma Klauber, and Nikki Nolan.

[00:38:44] It is edited by Nikki Nolan and Talia Mole, transcripts and writing is done by Emma Klauber. Efe Akerman created the theme music.

[00:38:49] Visit our website www.matteroflifeanddebt.com, where you can listen to more episodes, access transcripts, and get additional context for the subjects you just heard about. Absolutely for free the website again, www.matteroflifeanddebt.com.

Thanks again for listening.

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