Donavan McKinney for Congress in Michigan's 13th District

Donavan McKinney is a lifelong Detroiter, proud husband to the love of his life Shaunté, and devoted father of two young children. He grew up poor in northeast Detroit, and was raised by his mother and grandmother who taught him the importance of community, leadership, and service. He is a proud product of Detroit Public Schools, and proud to be the first in the family that raised him to become a college graduate (Go Blue!).

Driven to fight for hardworking families like his own, Donavan led coalition work with SEIU Healthcare Michigan, organizing for workers to earn a living wage and be able to provide for their family. Today, he serves the people as State Representative. His first-hand experience living the problems many in his community face has led Donavan to fight for solutions in Lansing as big as those crises — and he’s committed to continuing to push for bold, progressive policy in DC.

Growing up in the shadow of Detroit’s smokestacks and factories, Donavan developed an asthmatic cough he still has today — a cough his mother, grandmother, and brother have too, and a cough he’s committed to preventing in his own two young children. In January 2020, two years before his election to the State House, Rep. McKinney made history with his appointment to Michigan’s first Environment Justice Council by Governor Gretchen Whitmer, where he has advocated for water accessibility and affordability. He was instrumental in Gov. Whitmer’s $2 Million Water Restart Grant Program and her statewide Water Reconnection Executive Order during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the State House, Rep. McKinney has fought hard for his district. MI House District 11 is the poorest district in the state, with a median income of less than $20K. His priorities while in office are ensuring families have access to clean air and water, ensuring every child in Michigan can receive a quality public education, improving the criminal justice system, pushing for a robust, quality public transit system, and expanding the rights of unions and workers. He has worked to lower costs and increase affordability for the people, including fighting for free pre-K for all children in Michigan, and to decrease Michiganders’ utility bills by holding DTE accountable. He also led efforts to transform the criminal legal system, such as in legislation he co-introduced to prohibit police officers tampering with body-camera evidence, to limit the use of no-knock warrants, and to revoke an officer’s license if they use excessive force.

In office, he delivered more than $10 million in community violence intervention programs to Detroit and other areas, leading to the creation of Michigan’s first-in-the-nation statewide CVI program, as well as helping secure millions of dollars for community rec centers and public schools, and helping fund over $600 million to replace lead pipes in Detroit and its suburbs, because no parent should have to worry about their children’s drinking water poisoning them. He is committed to getting big money out of politics, and elevating the voices of voters over the influence of super PACs and corporations, helping lead the introduction of a slate of bills in the State House that would ban monopoly utility corporations and government contractors from making political donations.

Now, Donavan is running for Congress to put people first and deliver tangible results for our communities, just as he’s done in the legislature and the union. He’ll focus on kitchen-table issues and stand up to the Trump-Musk administration’s ruinous policies that hurt Michiganders. We can count on him to be our voice for a change.

WHAT DONAVAN IS FIGHTING FOR

I’m running for Congress because I believe we deserve champions in Washington who aren’t scared to dream — and fight for — a vision big enough to match the scale of our crises. And I’m running because I’ve lived through the same bull**** as you my whole life, right here at home in Detroit. In Lansing, I’ve fought and delivered for this community as your State Representative, but I can no longer sit on the sidelines while I watch this Congress and our Congressman do nothing in the face of the Trump-Musk administration.

We don’t need more career politicians or multimillionaires pretending to serve us while we watch them play dead in Washington and ignore our calls at home. This campaign isn’t about me — it’s about all of us deserving a Democratic Party that can actually fight back against Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the billionaire 1% that are picking our pockets to line their own.

Here are some of the things I plan to fight for us in Washington:

Economic Security, Living Wages, & Union Jobs

As a proud former member of SEIU Healthcare Michigan, I know personally just how important unions are to our city’s history, our workers, and building the fair economy we all deserve. But for decades, we’ve watched corporations and their paid-for politicians gut our unions and their power, while billionaires only get richer and pay even less in taxes. Growing up, my mother often worked two and three jobs at once just to put food on our table. No one should have to do that. No one should have to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet — let alone barely survive.

I’m fighting for all my union family and for every worker to have the right to form a union, earn a living wage, and be able to provide for their family. That starts with making the ultra-wealthy like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Congressman Shri Thanedar pay their fair share — like the rest of us working people already do. Raising taxes on billionaires and corporations could fund crucial investments our community needs for housing, education, clean air & water, fair paying jobs and healthcare. While billionaires have rigged the system to create massive income equality in Michigan and nationwide, everyone deserves money in their pocket through a universal basic income. Don’t let anyone tell you we can’t fund our people’s most basic needs while the Elon Musks of America have managed to pay $0 in income taxes.

Environmental & Climate Justice

Our district is the poster child for communities in need of the Green New Deal. It’s no secret to every person in this district that we have lead in our water and some of the most polluted air in the country. No one can be expected to raise a family without clean air & water. My grandmother, my mother, my brother, and I all have the same asthmatic cough that is all too common for anyone who grew up in the shadow of our city’s smokestacks and factories. I’m not willing to let another generation of my family or yours suffer the same fate that we have while the fossil fuel companies who are driving this crisis — like DTE and Consumers Energy — raise our utility prices, make record profits year after year, and buy our politicians’ inaction.

It’s time to break the cycle and understand that we need a solution as large as the climate crisis itself. A Green New Deal transitioning to 100% clean and renewable energy, would protect our planet’s future and create millions of good-paying green union jobs in Michigan. It’s also a more efficient and sustainable source of energy that will lower energy requirements and consumer costs, while improving our community’s health and cleaning our air & water. And one critical aspect of that for us in metro Detroit is investment to build and expand public transit, so people have the freedom and mobility to get to work, go to the supermarket, and pick up their kids without having to buy a car and pay some of the highest car insurance rates in the country. We deserve choices that corporations won’t let us have. We’re paying the price for this crisis built by greedy CEOs — but they’re the ones who should be paying to fix it.

Rebuilding Democracy: Getting Big Money Out of Politics

If you’ve ever wondered why our politicians aren’t fighting for us, why they don’t seem to understand the urgency of our crises, or why they look the other way when we call for our basic needs to be met — it’s because of our broken campaign finance system. Because of the Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United decision 15 years ago, our current system gives corporations, millionaires, and billionaires the power to purchase politicians and their inaction with unlimited dark money. None of us can compete with millions of dollars from CEOs — and we shouldn’t have to. Our democracy should be by and for the people, but as long as our elections are auctions for the highest bidder, the wealthy few’s wallets will be more powerful than the voices of the majority.

In the State Legislature, I’ve fought to get big money out of politics, helping lead the introduction of a slate of bills in the State House that would ban monopoly utility corporations and government contractors from making political donations. I’m ready to take that same fight to Washington. Be it our multimillionaire Congressman who bought this seat with his own money or the corporate and right-wing Super PACs that will spend millions to support him, the future of our democracy demands we put an end to this corruption.

Education & Investing in Our Youth

Our kids are struggling, plain and simple. No matter their race, gender, zip code, or religion, everyone is feeling the effects of decades of defunding and GOP attacks on our public schools. As a proud product of Detroit Public Schools, my mom had to send me to a school that took me an average of two hours to get to every day on the bus, just to ensure I got a quality education. We cannot settle for that. Every family deserves a well-funded, fully-invested public school in their community that they are eager to send their kids to. We should not have seniors graduating high school without knowing how to read, and we should not have some of the lowest literacy rates in the country. This is not a reflection of our people, but a reflection of our politicians’ refusal to prioritize the federal investments we need to support our kids.

I’m going to Washington to put federal dollars back in our public schools; to invest in paying our teachers higher wages, nationwide universal free school lunches, expanding early child care resources, providing universal free pre-kindergarten, and broadening the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to fully fund equitable education for all children. We also need better federal funding for youth programming so every child can benefit from the community centers, mentorship, and programming opportunities that saved my life years ago.

But federal investments in quality, public education cannot stop at high school. All public colleges, universities, and trade schools should be tuition-free and all existing student loan debt should be canceled. Pursuing a higher education of any kind should not be a financial death sentence for anyone.

Healthcare and Housing for All

Every person deserves to be able to put a roof over their head and take their kids to the doctor without worrying if that comes at the expense of putting food on the table. Growing up, poverty wages led my family to experience evictions and move over 13 different times which also meant we definitely didn’t have the money to prevent my pre-asthma from turning into asthma I still have.

As a former leader within SEIU Healthcare Michigan, I know our families cannot afford anything less than Medicare for All, which would ensure everyone in this country has healthcare — no matter their employment status, zip code, race, gender, sexuality, or disability. Medicare for All would include coverage for dental, vision, mental health, reproductive health and abortion care. It would also include community-based long term support services, ensuring hundreds of thousands of disabled people are able to finally get the home care they need.

I support a national homes guarantee that would give every Michigander safe, sustainable, and permanently affordable housing. With less than the money we spend on the Pentagon’s budget every year, we could change millions of lives. We could build 8.5 million new public housing units, fund local development of 3.5 million new private, permanent affordable housing projects, and fund billions for public housing repairs, climate resiliency, and critical infrastructure upgrades throughout the country. In order to do so, we must repeal the Faircloth Amendment that has put a federal limit on public housing spending for 25 years.

In Detroit, over 50% of households are renters. We need to protect all tenants with better federal protections including nationwide rent control to cap annual rent hikes from corporate real estate conglomerates, just-cause eviction protections to stop baseless evictions, federal right to counsel legislation so every renter facing eviction has a lawyer, and strengthening tenant unions so tenants have the power to defend themselves against greedy and predatory landlords. We must ensure that rent is affordable and accessible to everyone, and that renters aren’t price-gouged by greedy landlords who exploit our housing shortage and the economic insecurity of our community in order to increase their own profits.

Letting corporations control our housing market is what led to the 2008 recession and our current crisis. We need a massive investment of federal resources driven by human need—not real estate profits.

Fixing Our Broken Criminal Justice System The United States currently incarcerates more people per capita than any other independent democracy in the world, at a staggering rate of 580 residents incarcerated per 100,000 people.

Our status as the highest-incarceration democracy in the world comes with a price.

Economically, the United States annually spends more on prisons than it does on schools — an allocation of resources that only causes the school-to-prison pipeline to strengthen, as more students are left behind and less equipped to achieve economic security through traditional education or careers. But our communities also pay the price of our over-incarceration, as families are torn apart and communal systems of care are uprooted. And the vast majority — on average, 62% nationwide — of those held in our jails are being held pre-trial, and so are presumed innocent of any crime. 62% of those who are held in jails, away from their loved ones and community, are only there because they can’t afford the tens of thousands of dollars that our cash bail system requires in order for their freedom — even though they have not yet been found to have committed any crime.

I am committed to doing all that I can in Congress to transform the criminal justice system. That includes ending cash bail, because we should not be jailing people simply because they are poor. It includes reallocating funding to invest in social, health, and rehab services so that we are able to reach people who are at risk of incarceration before they end up stuck in the system. It also includes reforming sentencing guidelines, ending the school-to-prison pipeline by investing in quality public education and wrap-around services for all our youth, ending qualified immunity, and much more.

Diplomacy-First Foreign Policy

The Pentagon has the largest budget of any federal government agency. As a result we spent nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars every year to line the pockets of corporate defense contractors, and to wage endless wars abroad. You know what doesn’t cost a trillion dollars? Leading with diplomacy, our nation’s greatest foreign policy asset — not bombs and weapons.

In Congress, I will oppose the bottomless and unconditional funding of weapons and bombs because we cannot keep funding human rights violations and war crimes with our taxpayer dollars. Instead, those dollars can be better spent here at home on urgent needs in our communities — from aging infrastructure to housing to ensuring our veterans get the job opportunities and healthcare they have earned.

Immigration

Donald Trump ran a campaign of divide-and-conquer, attempting to turn our communities against each other, to distract us from the fact that the people actually stealing our jobs and making us unsafe are the corporations and billionaires he’s cutting taxes for. There’s a reason the first corporation to max out donations to Donald Trump’s campaign was GEO Group, one of the largest private prison corporations in the United States — the same corporation that ICE just awarded a $1 billion contract.

Now, Trump is waging an all-out war on all immigrants in this country, deporting anyone no matter their legal status, targeting those he disagrees with politically with an assault on free speech, and even defying the Supreme Court he handpicked. These are not normal times and the Democratic Party must be a party that includes all of us, fights for all of us, and opposes this agenda of mass deportations, internment camps, and the criminalization of immigrant communities.

We need a pathway to citizenship for all immigrants, tackle the bureaucracy that makes immigrating to this country so difficult, reform our asylum process, shut down for-profit detention centers, and not turn our back on refugees fleeing danger and disaster.