Barry Wu Popular Books

Barry Wu Biography & Facts

Michelle Wu (Chinese: 吳弭; born January 14, 1985) is an American politician serving as the mayor of Boston, Massachusetts, since 2021. The daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, she was the first Asian American woman to serve on the Boston City Council, from 2014 to 2021, and acted as its president from 2016–2018. She is the first woman and first non-white person to have been elected mayor of Boston. At 36 years of age, she is also the youngest individual to have been elected to the position in nearly a century. Wu is a member of the Democratic Party. While on the Boston City Council, Wu authored several ordinances that were enacted. This included an ordinance to prevent the city from contracting with health insurers that discriminate in their coverage against transgender individuals. She also authored ordinances to have the city protect wetlands, support adaption to climate change, enact a plastic bag ban, adopt Community Choice Aggregation, and provide paid parental leave to municipal employees. As a city councilor, Wu also partook in a successful effort to adopt regulations on short-term rentals. During her mayoralty, Wu was an advocate for a municipal "Green New Deal" (the Boston Green New Deal) and signed an ordinance to divest city investments from companies that derive more than 15 percent of their revenue from fossil fuels, tobacco products, or prison facilities. She also has announced plans for the city to spend $2 billion on school construction projects as part of a "Green New Deal" for the city's public schools. As mayor, she has also taken actions related to increasing affordable housing in the city and taken actions related to the city's COVID-19 policies. A supporter of fare-free public transportation, Wu has funded a pilot program of fare-free service on three MBTA bus routes, expanding on a single-route pilot program that had previously been started under Kim Janey's preceding acting mayoralty. She also reached a contract agreement with the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association that secured the union's agreement to significant reforms within the Boston Police Department. Wu is considered a political progressive and a protégé of Elizabeth Warren. Warren was one of Wu's professors in law school and Wu worked on Warren's 2012 United States Senate campaign. Early life and education Michelle Wu was born on January 14, 1985, in the South Side of Chicago, Illinois to Taiwanese American parents. Her father, Han Wu, was admitted to the Illinois Institute of Technology for graduate studies; however, neither he nor his wife spoke much English. Raised with Mandarin Chinese as a first language, Wu often interpreted between English and Mandarin for her parents. Her parents later were divorced. One of four children, Wu was graduated from Barrington High School in 2003 as the valedictorian of her class. Wu received perfect scores on the SAT and ACT and in 2003 was selected as a Presidential Scholar from Illinois. Wu's parents hoped that she would pursue a career in medicine so that she would have financial stability. Wu moved to the Boston area to attend Harvard University, from which she was graduated in 2007 with a Bachelor of Arts in economics. After graduation, Wu worked as a consultant with the Boston Consulting Group. When her mother began to suffer from mental illness, Wu resigned, moving back to Chicago to care for her mother and two youngest siblings. To support her family financially, Wu started a teahouse business in the North Center neighborhood of Chicago. In 2009, she returned to Massachusetts with her mother and youngest siblings to earn her J.D. from Harvard Law School, from which she graduated in 2012. In 2010, Wu worked in Boston City Hall for Mayor Thomas Menino in the Office of Administration and Finance and later as a Fellow at the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Policy under Menino's chief of staff, Mitch Weiss. In this position, she both designed a streamlined process for restaurants to receive licenses and established a food truck program. Also in 2010, Wu graduated from Emerge Massachusetts, a training program for women who aspire to elected office. The following year, she worked at the Boston Medical Center-based Medical Legal Partnership, where she provided legal services to low-income patients. In her first semester at Harvard Law School, one of her professors was Elizabeth Warren. After Wu explained her family's situation, a long friendship developed between the two women. Warren stated, "Michelle was doing something in law school that, in 25 years of teaching, I never knew another student to be doing." In 2012, Wu worked as the constituency director for Warren's successful senatorial campaign against Scott Brown. In this position, Wu coordinated outreach to all constituency groups, including communities of color, the LGBT community, veterans, and women. Wu is considered a protégé of Warren. City Council Wu, a Democrat, became a member of the Boston City Council in January 2014. Wu was the first Asian American woman to serve on the council, and only the second Asian American member to serve on the council. In late 2014, Wu became the first city councilor in Boston history to give birth while serving on the Boston City Council. From January 2016 to January 2018, she served as president of the council, the first woman of color and first Asian American to hold the role. When she took office as city council president, Wu was only the third female president in the then-106 year history of the Boston City Council. Wu was regarded as a progressive on the City Council. Wu was first elected to a Boston City Council at-large seat in November 2013. She finished in second place to incumbent Ayanna Pressley, with the top four finishers being elected to the council. She was re-elected in 2015, 2017, and 2019, placing second behind Pressley in 2015 and placing first in both 2017 and 2019. In 2021 election, Wu decided not to seek a fifth term on the City Council and to run for mayor instead. Paid parental leave In April 2015, the Boston City Council passed a paid parental leave ordinance that was authored by Wu. The ordinance provided city employees with six weeks of paid parental leave after childbirth, stillbirth, or adoption. Mayor Marty Walsh supported Wu's ordinance prior to its adoption and signed it into law in May. Wu had conceived this legislation after her own first pregnancy when she learned firsthand (after giving birth in December 2014) that municipal employees were not being offered paid child leave. In 2021, Wu proposed the idea of expanding this paid child leave policy to also provide leave for the broader category of pregnancy loss, rather than strictly for stillbirths. In September, by voice vote, the Boston City Council passed an ordinance written by Councilor Lydia Edwards and co-sponsored by Wu and Annissa Essaibi George that changed the wording of her earlier ordinance from "stillbirth" to "pregnancy loss", and also exte.... Discover the Barry Wu popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Barry Wu books.