Mallon grew up in Brockton, where her family experienced poverty and food insecurity but she benefited from “an activist municipal government and the social safety net programs it promoted.” She has lived in Cambridge with her husband and two children for 13 years, during which she founded the Cambridge Weekend Backpack Program, which sends food home with more than 500 low-income students every weekend. That led to her hiring as education liaison to then-mayor David Maher.

Top three priorities:

Wraparound services for our kids and families. “We need to make sure that no child is falling through the cracks, especially when transitioning between schools. I want to work with the City Department of Human Services to create a dashboard that keeps track of all of the city’s resources and the families who need them, so that we are providing for our children all the way from K-12.”

Affordable housing and housing affordability, to maintain the economic diversity of our residents. “We have a moral and social justice imperative to maintain economic diversity in our city.”

Bike and pedestrian safety. “We need policies that support all choices and lifestyles to ensure safer streets for everyone. I am for well designed protected bike lanes, upgrading our sidewalks to meet accessibility standards, and working with the city and state to ensure a robust MBTA system.”

Excerpted from Scout Cambridge. Read the complete profile here.

Endorsements:

A Better Cambridge: “Alanna Mallon has already made Cambridge a better place by creating the Weekend Backpack Program, which ensures access to meals for our food insecure students. She has immense talent for spotting problems, creating the structures needed to address them, and coordinating existing solutions to better serve our most at-risk neighbors.”

Mallon comes in with a significant amount of credibility from her association with heavy hitters such as city councillor and former mayor David Maher and state Rep. Marjorie Decker; good will from the creation of the Weekend Backpack Program; and admiration for the program’s growth to other cities. Mallon’s heart is obviously in the right place, her performance on the campaign trail has been respectable and she has developed connections and political savvy that can get things done. She comes in with a lot of positives, and no readily identifiable negatives.