In the midst of a global pandemic, it’s not an easy time to decide to run for office.
But Amanda Rae Funaro, 41, decided she is going to do it anyway.
“If I can’t show up for my community in hard times like these and be brave, then I really have no place in running at all,” she said on April 20, when she announced her bid for the District 2 seat on Jefferson County’s Board of Commissioners.
But it wasn’t just the current state of the world that pushed her to run for commissioner.
“It’s been something I’ve been thinking about for a while now,” she said.
Four years ago, when District 2 Commissioner David Sullivan ran for re-election, she considered running against him. But the timing wasn’t quite right for Funaro.
“At the time I thought, maybe not now, not yet,” she said.
Having lived in Jefferson County for more than 30 years, Funaro calls herself a “local girl.”
She spent her earliest years in Old Town Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she was raised in a multi-generational, multicultural household with her mother, grandparents and two younger siblings.
From a young age, her family encouraged participation in civic and community activism. Funaro’s grandmother, one of the first Choctaw women to become a Doctor of Education, was president of a tribal college, while her grandfather, a minister and chairman of the Federal Taskforce for Urban and Rural Non-Reservation Indians, helped organize the Poor People’s March alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Her family moved to Jefferson County when she was 14 years old, and she graduated from Port Townsend High School.
After attending college, she returned to the county and worked at OlyCap as a Head Start teacher and family support specialist, but found it difficult to build a life on a teacher’s salary.
“It was a challenging time in my life, and I had to make the hard decision to leave work that I loved,” she said.
She returned to an earlier career as a bookkeeper and developed a clientele of businesses and non-profit organizations in the area. Guided by her entrepreneurial spirit, she became a founding member of the Jefferson County Chamber of Commerce Young Professionals Network and later served on the chamber of commerce board where she acted as chair in 2014 and 2015.
Funaro has worked closely with local government economic development, affordable housing, health equity, education and homelessness. Right now, she serves as the vice president of the Jefferson County Homebuilders Association and on the Affordable Housing and Homeless Housing Task Force Joint Oversight Board. She is also a founding member of the Jefferson County Collective Impact initiative and formerly served with the Washington State Association for Head Start, ECEAP, the Human Rights Alliance North Sound and Jefferson Healthcare’s Reproductive Task Force.
“It was never a question of ‘if’ I would run for county commissioner, but ‘when’ I would run for county commissioner,” she said.
In February, Sullivan announced he would not seek a fifth term on the board representing the Tri-Area, where Funaro lives with her partner Sean, her daughter and his two children. She decided it was now her time to run.
“I got some prompting from other folks in the community that helped solidify it for me,” she said.
Funaro, who now works as the operations officer at Good Man Sanitation, a locally owned and operated company since 1954, is launching a Democratic campaign to represent working families of Jefferson County.
She will run against Democrat Lorna Smith, a member of the county’s planning commission who announced her bid for the District 2 seat in February. So far, no other candidates are known. The candidate filing period is May 11-15. Commissioners serve four-year terms.
It was not an easy time to make the decision to run, she said.
“I’ll be frank, it looked a lot dreamier to be potentially one of three commissioners under 55 who are all representing working families in the time of a strong economy,” she said. “All of that looked very promising and exciting. Of course, it looks so different right now.”
But Funaro said she feels ready to handle what the future might hold.
“I feel like I’m really well placed for this,” she said. “I’m willing to sit in uncomfortable situations and make hard decisions.”
She hopes to continue working with small businesses and local entrepreneurs and focus more on sustainable growth of living-wage jobs and retaining young families in the county.
“As a resident of Jefferson County for the better part of 30 years, I still find myself in awe of the authenticity, resiliency and vibrancy of our community,” Funaro stated in a press release. “I am committed to the livability of Jefferson County and a sustainable economic recovery. It’s in service to our working families that I am running for county commissioner.”
