Ady Barkan – A Hero for All of Us

By Brad Lander, NYC Comptroller

ADY BARKAN. Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Warren.

I never figured out how to say “No” to Ady Barkan.
His first big ask came over a decade ago, during my first term on the City Council. He had drafted the “petition to discharge” to push the bill for paid sick days for all New Yorkers onto the City Council floor, even though it did not have the support of the Speaker. Ady expected me to be the first to sign it—a big risk for a Council freshman.
I tried to trick him by signing first, but in the third block on the list, hoping that the Speaker’s ire would be drawn to the people who wound up signing ahead of me (thank you Gale Brewer and Donovan Richards). Ady was a little disappointed in my trying to be too-clever-by-half—but he accepted my promise that I’d help get the remaining signatures needed to move the bill.
That was back before his diagnosis with ALS when, as the New York Times wrote in Ady’s obituary, he was “an energetic but relatively anonymous foot soldier for progressive causes, including rights for immigrants and workers, ending mass incarceration, and reforming the Federal Reserve.”
In those days, I had the blessing of working with him and our friend, Sarah Johnson, to launch and build Local Progress, a national network of progressive local elected officials now nearly 1,500 strong—that helped pass legislation like paid sick days and the Fight for $15 all across the country.
After his diagnosis with ALS in 2016, Ady struggled with the darkness of a death sentence. But he then found more courage and organized more relentlessly than anyone I’ve ever known.
Before his diagnosis, it wasn’t Ady’s instinct to make himself part of the story. But afterwards, he built upon the story of his own dying body to help catalyze fights for health care justice. He founded Be A Hero to involve others in those fights. In that work, he took on elected officials regardless of party, inspired others to take action, testified before Congress, and put his body on the line many times. And he was always fighting for care workers to have the pay and dignity they deserve.
Ady died on November 1, seven years after his diagnosis. While I know in hindsight it sounds foolishly hopeful, we really believed we had a lot more time with him. So it’s a hard loss. But his memory and legacy are much greater blessings.
You can read the tributes to Ady from President Biden, VP Harris, Majority Leader Schumer, Speaker Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Pramila Jayapal, AOC, and many others. There are moving obituaries in The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Huffington Post, and The Guardian.
One of my favorites is Jon Favreau’s clip on Pod Save America, which captures both his witty and sarcastic sense of humor, his insistence on using every opportunity to fight for change, and his deep joy in organizing for justice, even in the face of his death sentence.
You can read Ady’s story in his own words in his memoir, Eyes to the Wind, or watch the documentary Not Going Quietly. And I still find his rewriting of Reinhold Neihbur’s Serenity Prayer in his op-ed in The Nation (October 11, 2018) to be one of the most profound reflections on the boundary between courage, acceptance, and wisdom.
After his death I joined Ady’s family in Santa Barbara—on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, in a park he loved, and where had imagined many years of walks and runs—to comfort Rachael, his wife, Carl and Willow, his children, and Ady’s parents, and each other. We remembered his impish smile, his wry and bawdy jokes, his inexhaustible energy, his brilliant strategic wisdom (and ok, his confidence in his brilliant strategic wisdom), his commitment to organizing, and his profound belief in all of us and the people we organize with.
Ady’s last big ask came earlier this year. One of Be A Hero’s current campaigns is fighting against the form of health care privatization known as Medicare Advantage. Earlier this year, we passed the point where more than half of Medicare enrollees have been shifted to private plans. We’ll never get to Medicare for All through Medicare-for-Fewer-and-Fewer. Ady weighed in, urging me to reject the Medicare Advantage contract for New York City—bringing not only moral clarity, but strong legal arguments for why the procurement process was flawed.
In these often heartsick times, there are plenty of days when it’s hard just to get out of bed, much less to keep organizing. On those days, I think about Ady’s courage and persistence. If he could find hope and joy through collective action, in the face of his mortality and brutal reality, we can too.