Candidate Interview: Keycha Gallon runs for Richmond City Council District 4

Keycha Gallon grew up on Sixth Street in the Iron Triangle, in a neighborhood where families of every background looked out for one another. She left. She came back. And when she did, what she found shook her.

"It was a real culture shock for me. When I came back to Richmond, everything was so divided," Gallon said. "Richmond is cliquish. They don't make everyone feel all inclusive, and we have to get back to including everyone, because every stakeholder matters. If one person feels like they're left out, then we're doing a disservice."

Gallon is running for the District 4 seat on the Richmond City Council, challenging incumbent Soheila Bana in the June primary. She is a first-time candidate, the founder of a gun violence prevention nonprofit, a former union shop steward, a mother of two and grandmother of two, and someone who has never held elected office and does not pretend otherwise.

"If you (the council) heard the people, I wouldn't be running for city council," she said. "There are policies and initiatives being passed in the city of Richmond that do not support everyone. There are disparities that always get overlooked."

Who she is

The thread that runs through Gallon’s biography is loss. She lost her brother to gun violence.

"It was one wound, but it destroyed multiple lives," she said. "My mother never fully recovered from it, so I had to actually step up. He left six kids behind. So with his six kids, I had one at the time, it's pretty much raising, helping raise seven kids."

Out of that loss, Gallon built Keys to the Future, a nonprofit that began as a space for girls processing trauma from gun violence and has grown into a program serving entire family units. The organization uses trauma-informed art therapy and leadership development to help children and families heal. Last year, it took kids camping. This year, a trip to Pismo Beach is planned.

“You can’t just heal the kid without healing the whole family,” she said.

Gallon was the former local lead for Moms Demand Action and has used that platform to push for gun reform at the state level. She describes years of showing up at city hall, at community events, on city commissions, doing work she says was largely unpaid and largely unrecognized.

She served on the steering commission of the California Violence Intervention and Prevention Program and fought to change grant language that effectively locked out small nonprofits. The original framework required a dollar-for-dollar match and restricted eligibility to cities and counties, which she said guaranteed that only large institutions with existing capital could compete. Community-based organizations doing the actual street-level work were structurally excluded before the process even began.

“The smaller nonprofits would never, ever be able to get the money,” she said. “Because for every dollar you had, you had to have a dollar to match it.”

Gallon pushed to change the language so that 501(c)(3)s could apply independently, without having to partner with a city or county to access the funds.

“I fought for language change,” she said. “So that money is going to hit more inner city kids, because it’s boots on the ground money now.”

During the pandemic, Gallon used her own savings to pass out food, personal protective equipment, and sleeping bags to unhoused residents through Motivated to Help Others. She organized group chats where neighbors shared grocery lists. She rented out a theater in small groups so children could have a sense of normalcy. “We all we got,” she said. “It takes the community to save the community.”

On public safety

Gallon does not define public safety narrowly. For her, it means being able to move through the city without fear, to and from appointments, in and out of your home, and it is inseparable from mental health, workforce development, and housing.

“If you get a healthier community, if you build the economy, you will change the trajectory of some of this violence,” she said.

She does not support defunding the police. She also has personal reasons that complicate any simple position. One brother was killed by gun violence. Another died in a police encounter in Bay Point.

“Even though he lost his life dealing with a police encounter, I still believe that we have to have something in place to govern the people,” she said.

She is unwilling to choose between law enforcement and alternative response programs. She says the two are interdependent and that pulling resources from one to fund the other, without first rebuilding the underlying economy, would make things worse. She does want the police department to diversify and to understand better the cultures of the communities they serve.

“Every ethnic group is not the same, and when you are addressing the different cultures, you have to figure out a way to approach them effectively,” she said.

On housing and homelessness

Gallon says the homelessness crisis in Richmond is, at its root, an affordability crisis. She points to a wage gap she puts at more than $40,000 between the 94803 and 94801 ZIP codes as evidence that the city is economically fractured in ways that its policies have failed to address.

"There's an assessment that should be done to each homeless person," Gallon said. "I go out there, and I talk to some, because we pass out food to the unhoused, we pass out sleeping bags. And some people just say it's just cheaper to be out there on the streets. Which, in reality, it is."

She supports expanding shelter beds, tiny-home villages, and motel conversion projects, but says those investments will fail without parallel investment in income stability. Placing people in housing they cannot afford, she argues, only delays the next displacement.

“You can put me anywhere, but if I really can’t afford it, what’s going to happen? I’m going to end back up on the streets,” Gallon said.

On economic development

Gallon talks about economic development in terms of pipelines. Direct connections between residents and jobs in healthcare, trades, and the green economy. She wants vocational training restored in Richmond high schools, arguing that removing those programs removed a ladder.

“If you start getting these kids training when they’re in high school again, you’ll have more young people coming out, and they can help stimulate the economy,” she said.

She also wants the city to invest in small businesses, attract employers who will hire locally, and develop retail and dining that brings both internal and external spending.

“You have to get the outside dollars too,” she said. “You want to keep the inside dollars on the inside.”

On development proposals from outside interests, she says her test is simple: "Is it bringing jobs? Is it reducing homelessness? Is it growing the community as a whole?"

On the council itself

Gallon says she is not affiliated with any political group, including the Richmond Progressive Alliance, and she says so plainly.

“I stand solo,” she said. “I am an independent thinker.”

She says her view is that too much of what happens at city council meetings appears predetermined, that community voices are heard in form but not in substance, and that council members too often serve the agendas of their endorsers rather than the residents they represent.

"When the surveys are being done in Richmond, it's for a small group. Because, let's be honest, not everybody is on social media. Everyone's not computer savvy," she said. "So we have to get those notices out to the home. We have to have those town hall meetings. And when you invite them to the table, just don't invite them to the table, you give them a voice, and you hear that voice."

“Every councilmember is the voice of the people, not only in their district, but for all districts,” she said. “No councilmember should be up there with their own agenda.”

Gallon has specific frustrations. She described going to the council to raise the alarm about gun violence in Richmond and being told by a councilmember that they did not know it was a problem because they lived in a part of the city that wasn’t affected.

“I’m like, okay. And you’re sitting on the city council and don’t know that there’s a problem," she said. We weren't doing anything to educate the people about gun violence."

On the agenda

If elected, Gallon says her first six months would focus on awareness, raising the visibility of gun violence, suicide, domestic violence, and the health disparities hitting Black and brown communities in Richmond, and on putting structural safeguards in place that ensure those issues cannot be ignored.

On environmental challenges, including air quality and flooding, she says both require policy changes at the state level and direct accountability for industrial polluters. She argues that it is cheaper for Chevron to settle than to buy new equipment.

“I really don’t see Chevron going anywhere anytime soon,” she said. “So why not hold them accountable for getting the new equipment?”

Gallon says she has given roughly a quarter of her income to the work, to the nonprofit, and to the community since 2018. She is careful not to oversell what a single council seat can do. But she also says she is tired of watching Richmond’s potential go unrealized.

"We have to make Richmond more attractive, make Richmond a place that is full of pride and purpose, a city that once was thriving," she said.

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