2021 Master of Human Rights graduate Ta Mara Hill.
We caught up with Ta’Mara Hill as she completed her Master of Human Rights degree in spring 2021. She is originally from Hutchinson, Kansas, and earned a BA in sociology with minors in psychology and social work from the historically Black Wiley College in Marshall, Texas.
Tell us more about your background.
As an undergraduate at Wiley, I was honored to be a Walton-UNCF Education Reform Fellow, All Star Ambassador with the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and a national champion member of the Denzel Washington/Melvin B. Tolson Debate Society. These three experiences greatly influenced my decisions to attend policy school. Originally, I was supposed to be a member of the Humphrey School’s 2020 graduating class; I deferred for a year to complete a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Athens, Greece.
YOUNGSTOWN If incumbent Youngstown council President DeMaine Kitchen would have been successful in collecting 50 valid signatures on his nominating petitions, there wouldn’t be a contested Democratic primary for his seat.
But because of that failure, Kitchen, who’s in his first four-year term as president, is running in an unusual race against two other candidates all as write-ins.
His two challengers in the May 4 Democratic primary are Tom Hetrick, a nutrition educator for Mercy Health-Youngstown and a former neighborhood planner for the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp.; and Lee David Pupio, a retired city wastewater collections system maintenance operations employee.