Courtesy of Sarah Miller

When Alder Sarah Miller ’03 sat down to dig into caldo de pollo and fajitas on a Friday afternoon, she had New Haven history on hand. 

Before her stood Salsa’s Authentic Mexican Restaurant. The Grand Avenue building in Fair Haven was divided between the Italian DiSorbo’s Bakery and Milano’s Meat Market in the 1980s. Miller pulled out a black-and-white image of the two old stores posted in the “Fair Haven Memories” Facebook group.

Even as Ward 14’s demographics have changed from majority-Italian and Eastern European to majority-Latino, it has retained its identity as a neighborhood of immigrants, Miller said.

Born in New Haven in 1980, Miller grew up in the neighborhood of Westville. She majored in literature during her time at Yale and went on to work as an acquisitions editor for the Yale University Press specializing in Latin American literature. For the past two decades, she has lived in Ward 14 with her husband, who grew up in the neighborhood, and her two children, now aged 6 and 11.

Like many, she quit her day job during the pandemic, leaving her role at the Yale University Press in the summer of 2020. She could not work at home with “everything happening all around the world,” she explained. 

In her new job as a manager of strategy and planning for Clifford Beers Community Care Center, the oldest outpatient mental health clinic in the United States, Miller has been able to bring her ongoing passion for community advocacy into her day job.

When her children started attending school at the Family Academy of Multilingual Exploration, or FAME, in 2014, Miller co-founded the group NHPS Advocates, a coalition that aims to improve New Haven public schools. 

“You get in the schools, you see something that’s not quite right,” Miller said. “You try to fix it at the school level, you kind of keep going up, looking at systemic issues around curriculum and how we spend money and just the culture of the district and the way decisions are made.” 

When the Ward 14 Board of Alders seat became vacant in spring of 2021, Miller began campaigning for the role, hoping for a chance to tackle some of these greater structural issues that she had noticed during her activism work. She was elected and began her new position this January. 

Miller has been a familiar figure in the neighborhood for decades, but she had not set out to represent her neighbors in City Hall, referring to herself as “more of a back-of-room person than front-of-room.” 

Ward 14 in particular has needed an advocate, and serving on the Board of Alders is a uniquely difficult job that not everyone wants to take up. The past four alders in Ward 14 either resigned mid-term or were largely absent. 

From fielding calls to meeting with neighbors and attending multi-weekly meetings, being an alder requires over 20 hours of work each week. However, the city pays a salary of only $2,000 dollars a year, Miller told the News.

“You’re asking someone to do a part-time job for no money,” Miller said. 

Miller found it “weird” to mail out pamphlets and flyers plastered with her face, she said. But she had door-knocked in the Ward for multiple other campaigns, and for her own campaign, she knocked every door in Ward 14 at least once — or twice. 

Dave Weinreb, a Ward 14 resident and former board member of the Fair Haven Community Management Team, said that Miller “puts in the time” to do this type of grassroots work. Miller estimated that she has personally interacted with about half of the ward’s 4,000 registered voters. 

As alder, she needed to make sure that city money came to Ward 14.

First up, Miller wanted some of New Haven’s $115.8 million dollars in American Rescue Plan funds to go towards renovating the neighborhood’s Quinnipiac River Park. Miller has also been working on plans to renovate the Strong School, a century-old brick school building that has been a vacant break-in hazard for the district since 2010. The new proposal includes apartments as well as a potential nonprofit community youth and arts center and commercial space. A developer for the project will be chosen in October, Miller estimates, and then the construction will take three to four years. 

“That’ll be a real win,” Miller said. 

At the Yale University Press, Miller’s work had a clear beginning, middle and end. She would commission and edit a book manuscript, then publish the finished copy. Though her work in Ward 14 is a distinctly different line of work, the world of ideas has shaped how she approaches her work as an Alder in the public sphere. 

She pairs concrete projects — “things you can do right now” — with longer, more complicated projects like the Strong School renovation that take more time. 

Bold, geometric posters designed by local artist Daniel Pizarro will soon be displayed on panels throughout Grand Avenue, depicting sailboats, drums and ladders, among other icons. Miller said the ladder symbolizes how Ward 14 is a place that “kind of helps people get going,” while the sailboats and drums reflect different elements of the district’s diverse Latino culture.

The public art is only one facet of the Grand Avenue Main Street Development project, which is in collaboration with the city’s Economic Development Administration. The plan includes renovating the facades of properties on the street and installing walkways and more lighting, benches, plants and garbage cans. 

But Miller’s job is not all art projects. 

Community engagement is low in the area, and Miller wants to change that. Even though Ward 14 has the highest voter turnout compared to the other districts, rates are still objectively low, she said. Out of some 4,000 registered voters, 400 to 600 will turn out to vote depending on the race.

“The people who participate in the community are often the people who are not struggling as much,” Miller said. “And so you always try to figure out how you get the information from people who are struggling. And there’s not an easy answer to that.”

Ward 14 has its fair share of challenges. Martin Torresquintero, a co-chair of the New Haven Democratic Town Committee, said that Miller has been a “beacon of hope” for the ward, working to resolve drug dealing and crime-related issues in Fair Haven.

But Miller wants to focus on what the neighborhood has to offer. Her children feel at home in Ward 14, running to the deli for a snack or going to the barbershop where “everybody knows everyone.” 

Two of this year’s former candidates for Connecticut statewide offices also call Ward 14 home – Karen Dubois-Walton, who lives two blocks down from Salsa’s, and Maritza Bond, who lives “over the river and up the hill.”

“It was great to have two women of color running for state office from not just New Haven, but our corner,” Miller said.

As the lunch ended, Alexis Ramirez, whose mother Juana Ramirez owns Salsa’s, stopped by the table to ask about a litter cleanup Miller was organizing at the Quinnipiac River Park on October 8. He said that he himself spent a lot of time at the park, and whenever he went, he tried to pick up a few pieces of garbage from beside the overflowing trash cans near the water. 

“That’s a great example of a staffing issue,” Miller said. “You can only have as many trash cans as you have the capacity to empty.”

And right now, with the city understaffed, that job goes undone. 

Ramirez said he would be there at the cleanup. 

The Friends of Quinnipiac River Park meets for their stewardship work every Thursday from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the summer months. 

Charlotte Hughes | Charlotte.hughes@yale.edu