Cheung Discusses Plans For Council

A can of Full Throttle energy drink in one hand and a cell phone in the other, Harvard Kennedy School student Leland Cheung shared his experiences as the first Asian American Cambridge Councillor with a small group of students and community leaders in Boylston Hall yesterday.

The event was hosted by the Harvard Radcliffe Asian American Association and the Asian Pacific Americans for Progress, a national organization dedicated to supporting progressive candidates and policies.

Harvard Law School student Michelle Wu ’07, director of APAP-Greater Boston, said she decided to organize the event to link the Asian American student community and local leaders with Cheung, a figure whose accomplishment she said can serve as a model for other Asian Americans.

While Cheung said he is still in the process of figuring out the meaning of his historic election, he said that the most important vision he has for the Asian American community is to encourage this demographic to run for public office.

He said that this goal is especially important because though Asian Americans typically outperform other minorities in areas like education and income, they are severely underrepresented in leadership roles.

This discrepancy informed Cheung’s own motivations to run for office.

“None of them looked like me, none were a decade within my age, none really represented me or the people I knew,” Cheung said of the composition of the City Council.

When asked about his prospects for higher offices, Cheung said he intended on “serving Cambridge” and made community the centerpiece of his discussion.

To improve the city, he said he seeks to bring the City Council into the 21st century technologically and to work aggressively to retain small businesses in Cambridge.

As the first University student and youngest member to be elected to the Council in recent memory, Cheung also said he hopes to create more links between residents and students.

Keeping “pretty busy” by pursuing an MBA at the MIT Sloan School of Management and an MPA at the Kennedy School, Cheung said he had the help of student volunteers in mobilizing the community during his campaign.

Throughout the process, Cheung said he walked many miles and knocked on countless doors, a strategy he was surprised to find was used only rarely by candidates.

He said the approach paid off not only because he lost some weight, but because he had the most demographically diverse voting base of the 20 candidates who ran for City Council.