Stick to Your Goals, Says Former NYC Council Speaker Christine Quinn

Have you ever been told that you wouldn’t succeed? Christine Quinn has, and she has some advice on how to handle it: Don’t let it stop you from pursuing your goals.

Quinn, the former speaker of New York’s city council and a onetime candidate to be mayor, talked about her political career in an October 6 visit to SIPA.

“No one had any compunction about telling me that I wasn’t going to win the city council speaker seat, but you can’t listen to other people,” Quinn told assembled students. “People will go out of their way to tell you all the ways that you can’t succeed, because they don’t think they can succeed. They believe that there is a finite amount of success. You winning means that they will lose.”

“If I had listened to other people, I wouldn’t have become city council speaker,” she added.

Quinn described how she was able to gain support from Thomas Manton—an former U.S. congressman who was instrumental in helping the previous council speaker gain the position. Manton’s support came as a surprise to others in the party, but it helped Quinn become both the first woman and the first openly gay person to serve as council speaker.

Although Quinn lost her bid for the 2013 Democratic mayoral nomination, she said the experience, and the two years that followed, were enlightening.

Among other things, Quinn said that listening to certain advisors had hurt her campaign.

“I realized that the degree to which I shied away from the reality of possibly being the first female mayor damaged my race,” she said. “I am embarrassed that I bought into the idea that talking about being a woman would lower the rhetoric of the race. I should have owned my sexuality and gender identity as a positive thing.”

Quinn today is the president and CEO of the nonprofit organization Win (Women in Need), the largest provider of shelter and supportive housing for homeless families in New York City. Although Quinn would not say if she plans to run for mayor again, she vowed to not let the opinions of others change how she represented herself, today or in the future.

The presentation was inspiring to many on hand. It prompted one student to stand up and announce: “As you can see, I am a woman but what you can’t see is that I am also bisexual. In the past I have allowed people to soften me, but I’m not going to stand for that anymore.”

— Serina Bellamy MIA ’17