Since taking office in January, fourth-year environmental science student Ava Olson has had to balance serving on the Corvallis City Council with all her other duties, including coursework in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences; volunteering with Sunrise Corvallis and WestM; her campus job at PRAx; and, somewhere in there, sleeping.
“I’ve always been very involved in politics. For me, it was like, if you’re looking for people who are going to be around for two years and have the skills, I know I have the skillset that’s needed,” said Olson, 22. “Out of all the things in my life that have changed as I’ve gotten older, being on City Council would not be one that would make 10-year-old me go, ‘What?!’ They’d be like, ‘That tracks.’”
Olson ran unopposed in her district, Ward 4, which includes most of the OSU Corvallis campus along with the College Hill neighborhood to the northwest. Because much of its constituency are students who tend to be registered to vote outside of Corvallis, Ward 4 traditionally sees low election engagement, she said.
Olson ran as part of a slate of candidates from Sunrise Corvallis, the local chapter of the grassroots political group that advocates for climate action and other progressive causes. She has been involved in activism and mutual aid work with Sunrise for several years, but the group ran into barriers getting policies moved through local government, so they decided to run for office themselves.
Olson, right, with Roy Rheuben, an OSU student who also ran for Corvallis City Council; and Carly Inez, their campaign manager and OSU alumnus.
Core tenets of Olson’s platform were climate and housing justice, with specific concern for the unhoused population in Corvallis. She is working with community groups to propose a rolling moratorium, similar to a managed camp, which would rotate the areas people are permitted to camp outdoors and limit the frequency of “sweeps” where tents and personal belongings are forcibly removed by the city. She also wants to work on increasing affordable housing locally.
On the issue of climate action, she said the current council is focused on emergency preparedness and community resiliency, with goals like developing community hubs and improving transit options.
“There’s a lot of stuff we can’t control at the local level, but there’s a lot of stuff where even a little bit of action will make a difference,” Olson said. “There’s a lot of steps that need to occur to make anything happen; it’s my job to make sure those steps happen as fast as they legally can.”
On the academic side, Olson started her college career at George Fox University as a political science major, before transferring to OSU to study environmental science with a focus on applied ecology.
She works part-time as a production technician at PRAx and also volunteers with the progressive Christian community center WestM.
Olson’s schedule leaves little room for anything else; during winter term, her friends organized a meal train to make sure she got plenty to eat. But still, she says, the work is worth it.
“There’s a lot of people I work with, especially my age, who really want to make a difference and get really stuck in this pit of hopelessness, and it’s a hard thing to pull yourself out of,” she said. “I’m stuck in it day by day too, but at least for me, I have an outlet for this energy. It’s a very direct way to be involved, and we do enough small things that it makes us feel like we’re making a change. If I focus too large on the national scale, it can kind of bog you down."
She also encourages other students to pursue political office if they feel moved to do so.
“You don’t know until you try,” Olson said. “A lot of it is realizing, ‘Sure, I’m not the best person for the job, but I am loads better than the worst person for the job.’ Lots of imposter syndrome, but you are more qualified than you think
“It’s a very big step in just having faith and confidence in myself and my community. Without a community, I would be lost and terrified. It’s very helpful to have folks to depend on.”
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