Inaugural speech of Jen Grigoraitis

This is the text of Mayor Jen Grigoraitis’ inaugural address delivered Monday night in Memorial Hall.

Thank you, all so much, and good evening, to you, Melrose! I want to thank our DPW and public safety teams for all their hard work during yesterday’s first snowstorm of the season. I also know we’re competing tonight with the college football championship game, and, as someone who married into a Michigan family, and I have a preferred outcome in mind. 

Thank you Karen Grant Blackburn, for guiding us through tonight as our MC and for your leadership of the Melrose Commission on Women. A special thanks to Lauren Grymek, Kathy Pigott-Brodeur, and the staff of Memorial Hall for organizing this wonderful celebration. Thank you to our friends at MMTV for broadcasting this event. And a special thank you to all of the Melrose students lending their time and talents to tonight’s ceremony. 

What a personal, professional and civic honor it is to be sworn in as the next Mayor of Melrose. 

I am surrounded by people from every chapter of my life tonight, which is humbling and inspiring. I’m especially grateful for my husband Bill, my children Graham and Reid, my parents, and my sister and her wonderful family, all of whom are with me tonight and have supported me every step of the way. 

We are honored to have House Democratic Whip, Congresswoman Katherine Clark, Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll, State Auditor Diana DiZoglio, Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan, State Senator Jason Lewis, and State Representative Kate Lipper-Garabedian with us in Melrose tonight. We are even more fortunate to have them representing us so well and with such care and courage. We value and need your partnership, and we thank you. 

And to our outgoing mayor, Paul Brodeur, I will add a big thanks for your encouragement and help during these weeks of transition and for your enduring service, and your friendship, over many years. 

I’d like to give a special welcome and offer my sincere thanks to Melrose mayor Gail Infurna and the many former Melrose elected officials who are with us tonight. Thank you for your leadership and for all you have done to support and strengthen Melrose. 

Thank you also to our City staff, who do the hard work every day in service to our community. You believe in the power of good governance, and I look forward to joining your team tomorrow. 

I have many dear friends and family members in the audience– and many watching from home, as well–who have known me for many years. I have felt your support and camaraderie and heard your cheers from near and far. 

I want to acknowledge my former colleagues from my past two decades in state service who are here tonight. I have learned so much from you, and you have shaped me into the public servant and leader that I am today. Thank you for making me better. 

Welcome and congratulations to my fellow Melrose elected officials on stage. I have had the pleasure to serve with many of you over the past four years, and I look forward to working with you over this next term, as a partner and a colleague. Like you all, I am tremendously proud of this community and grateful for all it offers us. It is no easy thing to put yourself out there. Thank you for running, for sharing your ideas, for engaging with residents, and for approaching this next term with a clear sense of purpose and an open mind. 

Civic engagement–service to your community–is one of the most optimistic and hopeful endeavors you can pursue. And to be successful, local government requires individuals, of all ideologies and walks of life, who look around a community and think: together, we can do better. 

Both parts of that statement are meaningful: the hope of making progress, and the commitment to doing it together. We will need the strength and dedication of that promise in the months ahead. 

Like me, no one on this stage would be here without the support and dedication of so many. And so I would particularly like to acknowledge the families of the elected officials here in Melrose. You are serving this community too, and we thank you. 

This idea of civic service–and civic responsibility–has been on my mind over these past months. 

Muhammad Ali said: “service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.” And I’ve been reflecting on that: on what it means for each of us, and on what it calls us to do. 

I hope that together, in the weeks and months to come, we will bring more and more opportunities for Melrosians to engage with their government and continue to pursue their own paths to civic service, since there are so many ways to engage with our government and to serve our community. 

We are off to a good start in that regard, I hope. I want to thank the volunteer members of my administration’s transition team for listening to so many stakeholders in the months since the election. Of course, that work continues. And you, our community members, have shared great ideas – one that we plan to implement is a Melrose Civics Day. This will be a chance for the community to come together to learn more about our shared government, the services we offer, the progress we are making, the challenges we face, and the ways to get involved and lend your talents to our shared endeavor of self-governance. This is just one step, but I hope it is a meaningful one. 

Starting tomorrow, I will be meeting with many colleagues across City government, including our public safety officials and DPW employees. I will have the opportunity to visit classes at Melrose High School to hear from students and will be participating in my first School Committee meeting as a Member. I will also gather with older Melrosians at the Milano Center to hear more about their priorities and ideas on how we can better support them. 

I know we all will start our work in Melrose with this premise: together we have so much to be proud of. Progress has been made, and more work remains. 

There are great things happening here all the time . . . in our neighborhoods, our schools, our City Hall, our small businesses and nonprofits, our arts and cultural organizations, and beyond. I want us to know about them, share them, and expand them. 

Yes, we have challenges. And I’m clear-eyed about them. One very real and significant hurdle will be our budget, as it becomes more and more clear that we do not always have the resources to do what this community rightly demands, and what it deserves. 

So here’s the challenge for us: let’s acknowledge our progress, the strength of our foundation, and then let’s work together to build on it. 

As we do this, things will not always be smooth. Change will move too slowly for some, maybe too quickly for others. 

We will face bumps in the proverbial civic road. There will be hard choices and, sometimes, only bad options. 

Critique will be inevitable. And that’s OK with me. 

I hope we will be honest with ourselves and each other. I hope the criticism will be constructive. 

I hope that we will always choose to center our shared humanity when we disagree. That we remember that the folks sharing opposite views are our friends, neighbors, and fellow residents in 

this community we ALL call home. 

Many of the people on this stage have experienced firsthand what divisiveness looks like at the national and state level. And while we can and should have uncomfortable conversations here in our own community, we need to do so without causing harm. We control our actions AND our responses; let’s have true and sustainable progress be our collective aim. 

If we adopt that frame, that progress is ours to achieve, together, we will be more successful as a community, and I believe we will be more engaged and fulfilled as individuals. 

I am proud to acknowledge that I am standing here as the first woman elected Mayor of this city, in a mayoral race with three women candidates. 

I am proud to share the stage tonight with the women who will lead our School Committee and our City Council, including the first woman of color in an elected leadership role in Melrose. 

A few glass ceilings are being shattered tonight, and much of it is because of the leadership example set by others, including those sitting with us on stage. 

My friend Chris Cinella recently shared with me the story of the very first woman Mayor in the United States. And you might be surprised, as I was, to learn that she served as mayor decades before women achieved full suffrage in this country. 

Susanna Salter of Argonia, Kansas became the first woman ever elected mayor in America on April 4, 1887, as Kansas had allowed women to vote in some local elections as early as 1885. 

But here’s the rub: Ms. Salter was never really supposed to win. 

She was active in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union at  the time, and her name was placed on the ballot as a joke by a group of men who wanted to mock her and the other women 

active in that movement, hoping a loss would discourage them from action and activism . . . hoping to limit their power. Well, the joke was on them when she won handily. 

And though she was the first, she would not be the last.

For that small corner of the country, she was a change-maker and trailblazer, even if an accidental one. 

Now that’s a story from a long-ago time. But it also speaks to a broader theme: we cannot stop progress. We cannot trick it. We cannot bind ourselves to the old ways, we can’t protect our power with hubris . . . or cover ourselves in the conceit that we know better because we always have. 

Nonetheless, progress doesn’t happen on its own. It takes hard work. 

And our communities are better and stronger when we include more people in that work, and not just by accident, but when we set our minds to it. It’s true that our community, and our leadership here in Melrose, is more diverse than it ever has been. 

Progress has been made, and more work remains, and I’m committed to doing my part. 

I’ll close with a quote from my hero, Hillary Rodham Clinton, of my alma mater Wellesley College, who described her life’s mission this way: 

“Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” 

There are so many people in Melrose who embody those words, who live their lives that way. In big ways and small ones, often behind the scenes, without seeking credit or glory – in all the places you can, as long as you can. 

I see you, and I value you.
And I know this: you and I, and all our fellow Melrosians, can’t do 

anything alone. We need each other. 

And so, my friends, neighbors and colleagues, here we go. Together, let’s move Melrose forward.