A 19-year-old is the first to announce a candidacy for one of Somerville’s four at-large City Council seats. Wilbert Pineda, an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, will follow Tufts undergraduate Jack Perenick as the second college student to seek a council seat in two elections.
Pineda announced his intent to run Jan. 25 at Somerville’s Orleans Restaurant.
Two of the city’s current councilors at-large, Willie Burnley Jr. and Jake Wilson, have announced challenges to incumbent mayor Katjana Ballantyne for her office. Because candidates may campaign for only a single office, it’s likely there will be at least two open seats for Pineda and other newcomers. Councilors Will Mbah and Kristen Strezo, have not publicly shared their plans for reelection.
Pineda remembers becoming interested in politics in 2016. As the child of a Salvadoran family attending the East Somerville Community School, Pineda recalls his feelings following Donald Trump’s first election to the presidency. “My classmates and I were scared,” he said. “That’s the reality. We were scared because some of my classmates were undocumented. We were scared because, you know … whatever views individuals have, we had a president who ran on a hatred campaign.” The student body at the school was 66 percent Hispanic in 2024-2025, according to the Massachusetts Department of Education.
“Part of why I’m running for City Council is to bring the immigrant community, represent them, bring my young perspective, represent the high schools, represent the countless amount of kids that I know who are like, ‘Wilbert, we don’t have food,’” Pineda said.
Education, housing and food security are some “basic needs” central to his campaign platform.
Pineda serves as vice president of the Somerville Foundation, a philanthropic nonprofit built out of the Somerville Education Foundation. One of its flagship programs, the Innovations in Education Grant Program, distributed $15,000 to Somerville educators in the 2023-2024 school year to pay for author visits, robotics equipment, kindergarten literacy efforts and a sensory room.
Pineda has worked since 2019 with the Somerville Food Coalition, a network of community partners supported by the city’s Office of Food Access and Healthy Communities and Cambridge Health Alliance’s Health Improvement Team.
The coalition’s steering committee includes members of Connexion Church, a Methodist church on Broadway, that Pineda cites as a model for addressing food insecurity. He’d like to help Connexion maintain its weekly meal program, he said, and incentivize other businesses to offer similar programs.
Pineda also hopes to implement a “Central Hill vision,” he said.
“We have all these squares, but we don’t have things connecting us,” Pineda told Cambridge Day. An energized Highland Avenue could serve that purpose.
To Pineda, who lives in Ward 7, serving as councilor at-large will best position him to perform this work. “We [in Ward 7] have an effective city councilor, Judy Pineda Neufeld, and I’m more interested in collaborating with her, working with her, than running against her,” he said. (Pineda and Pineda Neufeld are not related.)
“My initiatives, my thinking, is bigger than a ward,” Pineda said. “It’s all about a collective.”
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