Tim Cywinski starts our interview with a warning: “Be ready for your editor to hear some accidental but necessary curse words.”
Sure enough, pointed language begins to fly fast and frequently as we talk. There is no mistaking that Cywinski is fed up.
“We’ve been conditioned to believe that, if you don’t have as much money as somebody, you don’t have as much power,” he says. “That’s why I decided to run for Congress and also why I work at the Sierra Club. We want to empower communities to fight back against big pollution and big tech and bad faith politicians who just claim that they have our back.
“They beg for power and then they refuse to wield it for real people.”
A master’s degree in communications from Johns Hopkins University may have trained Cywinski to deliver such concise messaging but it was an itinerant, working class childhood that instilled his populist values. “In my first 10 years of life, I was in nine different schools,” Cywinski says. His brother had a heart defect and mounting medical bills ultimately forced his parents to sell their house to pay them.
“There were a lot of people worse off than me, but I did have to work two full-time jobs my entire academic career,” Cywinski says. “I was a waiter, I was a caterer, I was a very bad construction worker. I learned from those experiences that people who work the hardest are often the people who have the least amount of representation.”
In his nearly seven years at the Sierra Club, Cywinski points to a recent fight over a proposed landfill in very rural Russell County as one of his proudest moments. “The people who live there are predominantly poor and predominantly MAGA,” he says. “But they called our office, and I went down there. I saw that what was happening to them wasn’t fair. I don’t care that I might disagree with them politically, they don’t deserve this.”
After Cywinski spent months working with local advocates, the local Board of Supervisors voted down the project. It’s those kinds of victories that keep him fighting.
“I didn’t run for office to bullshit people,” he says. “We all live in a never-ending battle between good and evil and the difference is made by those who show up and those who fight hard. I just know which side I want to be on.”
