In Worcester Senate Race, Kennedy's Run Shaped By Life In Politics

WORCESTER, MA — It's a combination of Catholic schooling, a job at Coghlin Electrical and a chance meeting with a future lieutenant governor that put Robyn Kennedy on a path to running for state senate in 2022.

Kennedy, 41, won the Democratic nomination in September in the race for the 1st Worcester District state Senate seat, which state Sen. Harriette Chandler is retiring from at the end of the year. Kennedy prevailed in the primary by 11 points over Worcester Mayor Joseph Petty Jr., who has been winning elections in Worcester since before Kennedy was old enough to vote.

But Kennedy's rise as an electoral force this year likely won't come as a surprise to people who've been paying attention. She got involved in politics as a teenager and stuck around to work on campaigns while attending Assumption University. That led to work with major local political figures like Ed Augustus Jr. and U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern.

Asked to pinpoint where she got her first political ideas, she cites what she learned at Our Lady of the Angels Catholic School in Webster Square. A message about caring for your neighbors stood out in particular.

"When somebody's in need, it's about showing up to care for them," she remembers learning.

Her Catholic upbringing was mixed with political messages at home that shaped her ideals today. At school, for example, she would learn that abortion was evil, but at home, her mother ("The first feminist I knew") would explain all the reasons why women should be allowed to make that decision on their own.

During summers as a teenager, Kennedy worked at Coghlin Electrical alongside her mother. It was there she saw men sent out to do manual labor and women confined to the office to do clerical tasks.

"I didn't want to sit at the reception desk, I wanted to do that type of work too," she said of the division of labor in the office.

(It was also at that job Kennedy got to know Sue Coghlin, who won a school committee seat in 2019 and is now the owner of Coghlin Electrical.)

A bit of serendipity also helped Kennedy get into politics. In high school, she answered a knock at the door one day, and it was a guy named Tim Murray. He would serve three terms as Worcester's mayor before becoming lieutenant governor alongside Deval Patrick. He invited her to work on his campaign.

Kennedy says it was working for former treasurer and 2002 gubernatorial candidate Shannon O'Brien that got her really involved in political organizing. Her work with O'Brien led to an internship in McGovern's office. McGovern's chief of staff at the time was future state senator and Worcester city manager Ed Augustus Jr., and Kennedy would eventually go on to work for him.

After Murray won the 2006 lieutenant governor race, she applied for and was given a job in Patrick's appointments office, where she helped populate state boards and commissions — and made sure people from west of I-495 were represented. But after about a year, Murray invited her to work as a policy manager for a council that oversees how state departments work together.

It was in that role Kennedy got to work on issues like housing, homelessness and domestic violence — issues she has brought into her 2022 senate run, and that she got hands-on experience with while working at the YWCA in Worcester. It was also in that role that she saw a way to right past government wrongs.

Under Michael Dukakis, Massachusetts made the decision to place homeless shelter services under the Department of Transitional Assistance, which had the unintended consequence of cutting shelters off from the state’s housing agency.

"Over the next 30 years, we funded and responded to shelter as a welfare response as opposed to a housing continuum response," she said. "So housing resources were rarely connected to shelter."

Kennedy worked on changing the arrangement to place shelters within the state Housing and Community Development department, with the goal of providing a route from shelter to housing.

"That's what I'm eager to get back and continue to work on," she said.

Kennedy will face Berlin resident Lisa Mair in the Nov. 8 election. Mair is running as an independent and has focused most of her campaign on opposing pandemic policies, including vaccine and mask mandates. If Kennedy prevails in the race, she has a range of items she wants to work on, from homelessness and migrant resettlement to finding a way to make fare-free transit sustainable and ensuring that the state has a pipeline of future educators and healthcare workers.

With the primary behind her, Kennedy has time to focus on attending smaller community events as a sort of rehearsal for the job of being a state senator. She's also still on the campaign trail, accompanying incumbents like state Reps. David LeBoeuf in Worcester and Meghan Kilcoyne in Northborough, who are both facing Republican challengers this year.

Kennedy is also making time to reach out to young people and marginalized communities. Not just for votes, but to perhaps knock on the next future state senate candidate's door.

"It's all about finding the ways in which I could do that," she said.

This story is the first in a two-part series about the candidates running for the 1st Worcester District senate seat.