Welcome to another. that it's going to be okay.

Welcome to another episode of the McCarty Cellis Podcast. Today we have one of my friends, and it's kind of cool on the show because I get to bring my friends on this show

and we get to chat it up and talk politics and everything else but I have one of the most dynamic

not just black not just woman but dynamic human beings in politics Amanda Edwards how. How you doing it at?

I'm great. Thank you for that introduction, Bakari.

Yeah, because you know, we go way back. We go way way back. You know, we start each one of our episodes the same way Amanda and so we like people to walk us through the arc of their careers and so yours has banned private practice and public service walk us through your career stop since finishing Harvard.

And what are you up to now other than running for mayor of Houston?

Well, other than running for mayor of Houston,

it's been a really interesting journey of public service for me, and I know that you can understand this walk. A lot of what has motivated me over time has actually just been to be in places where you're most needed. So not always being in the spaces where we're most comfortable. So of course coming out of Harvard law, one would expect me just to, you know, go into the private sector and and stay there but of course there was something else tugging at me and one thing that's kind of part of my background or experience growing up is that while I had always been interested in public service, I really began to appreciate purpose behind public service when I was growing up and my dad was diagnosed with multiple my loma which is a form of cancer and I remember as a teenager asking him a lot of questions like who's going to cover this, how does this insurance stuff work,

this is my first real encounter with what insurance was and how it intersected

with our health care system or the lack thereof.

And I just remember thinking to myself,

this is really crazy.

And if they say no, then you just don't get treatment

and you die and it was just very dramatic,

but it's real life and death for a lot of people.

So that's been kind of a motivating force behind a lot of what I've sought to do over the years in public service is just to respond to the needs of community with urgency. So when I graduated from Harvard, as you asked me to start from there, when I graduated, I moved down to New Orleans because Hurricane Katrina had just happened.

And so I wanted to get down there, of course, I clerked in federal court during the week days,

but on the weekends, I taught seven graders how to use riding as a tool of empowerment just so that we could kind of help with that human capital that needed to be restored and so that was a really pivotal point for me where I knew that whatever I ended up doing and I knew public service was a part of that but regardless investing in whatever community that is was really important. So I went back home to Houston. I started practicing law and it's inen Elkins and then at Bracewell as a municipal finance lawyer.

So I was doing things like issuing tax exempt bonds to build schools and hospitals and

things, public purpose projects and facilitating public private partnerships but outside of that I was working in the community so I got to chair the board of an organization called Project Rowhouses, which is an arts-based community transformation organization and it's incredible in third ward in Houston and just got a chance to get my hands on a lot of community-based things. So we ultimately decided to throw my hat in the ring and not again to align with purpose, not being in the space where I was most comfortable. Many people don't really know that I don't love politics,

but I love public service.

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