Nijmeh pledges to donate her salary from Congress to local charities that support the unhoused

Since she has been serving as Chairwoman of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, Charlene Concepción Nijmeh has been forgoing a salary so that the Tribe could put those resources into other programs and initiatives. When she is in Congress, she wants to continue that tradition. She is pledging to donate the $174,000 salary that members of Congress receive to local charities in the 18th district that support the unhoused. The 18th congressional district, which includes portions of Santa Clara County, has one of the largest homeless populations in the United States.

“I don’t want to make a career of politics. Serving in Congress should be about public service. I want to go there for two or three terms to achieve specific legislative objectives in three areas: first, to addressing the nation’s housing shortage and the affordability crisis; second, to regulate Big Tech to better protect children on the internet; and third, to affirm California’s wrongly unrecognized tribes,” Nijmeh explains. “It would be nice to pass a national textile recycling law, too, but I understand that there are only so many hours in the day.”

“The People’s House is best served with fresh ideas and the spirit of the times, so it would be unconscionably get dusty there,” she explains. For the period of time that she is serving in Congress, Nijmeh will voluntarily commit to not owning any publicly traded stocks. Nijmeh believes that the insider trading epidemic on Capitol Hill is badly damaging to the nation’s democracy, and in order for her to address it credibly Nijmeh feels as though she must hold herself to the highest ethical standards.

“I challenge Rep. Zoe Lofgren to make those same commitments: donate your salary to charity and stop trading stocks while in Congress,” she posits. Nijmeh is running against Lofgren in California’s federal primary election on March 5th. Lofgren has been criticized for failing to report her stock trades.

Nijmeh has refused all corporate PAC money. Lofgren, on the other hand, is unabashedly rolling in it. Political observers do not expect Lofgren to meet that same ethics commitment, and is expected to continue to receive nearly two-thirds of her campaign contributions from special interest PACs and corporate campaign finance vehicles.

While going door to door in the district, voters have responded positively to Nijmeh’s pledge to donate her salary to organizations that support the unhoused. One voter said, “That’s a big deal. It means people are going to eat because of you.”

Nijmeh is an independently successful businesswoman who founded a textile recycling company fifteen years ago that has grown into a global enterprise with operations around the world, including in Turkey and Ukraine.

Today, Nijmeh’s company diverts more than 60 million pounds of textile waste from landfills each year, while providing a source of affordable clothing in Latin America. Her investment partnerships have created more than 6,000 jobs across 123 reuse stores and fiber reprocessing plant in Central America. Unlike Goodwill or Salvation Army, not a single item of clothing that she collects ever sees a landfill. What can’t be resold is reprocessed into fiber and used to manufacture building insulation, carpet underlay, and furniture filling.

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