Meet meghann

Meghann Adams is a seasoned organizer and union leader in the Bay Area whose commitments to the anti-war movement, the struggle for women’s liberation, and dignified working conditions for her fellow workers guide her vision for California’s fiscal and political responsibilities. Meghann has a 20 year history of organizing in the anti-war movement with the ANSWER Coalition, and has written about the need for a new political system that prioritizes people over profit through her contributions to the Breaking the Chains Magazine. Serving as the President of SMART 1741 (representing San Francisco and San Mateo school bus drivers and staff), Meghann tirelessly organizes and advocates for the workers who drive Bay Area students to school every day. A Bay Area local with a steadfast commitment to serving working people, Meghann brings a necessary perspective to California’s state budget of making the money work for the people and the planet, not for the billionaires.

Born to a working family in a rural area, Meghann learned from a young age the crises affecting under-resourced communities. She saw the ways in which hard-working people were systematically kept in cycles of poverty, forced to struggle with addiction, hunger, lack of health care, and made to work multiple jobs to earn a living wage. While earning her bachelor’s degree in Sociology at Beloit College in Wisconsin, Meghann witnessed the Islamophobia and manipulation of public interest to justify the war in Iraq. She became an anti-war activist and organizer with the ANSWER Coalition to draw attention to the ways in which US taxpayer dollars were funneled out of impacted communities at home, and invested in weapons and wars abroad. Now more than 20 years later, her progressive campaign as State Controller seeks to transform the carceral budget of California to fund people’s needs.

As President of her union, Meghann serves as fiduciary of SMART 1741. Through nearly a decade of managing union finances, she has developed a sharp skill set for fiscal responsibility, accountability, and transparency to members. As leader of SMART 1741, Meghann organized her fellow workers in car caravans during the COVID-19 pandemic to drive through the working-class communities they serve, protesting the budget crackdown that left drivers without health care in the middle of an international medical crisis. She recognizes universal healthcare as a human right, and advocates that California provide healthcare for its citizens, so that workers in her union and across the state are not at the whim of their employers for accessing necessary medical care.  

Since moving to the Bay Area in 2007, Meghann has contributed to several local struggles through her work with the Party for Socialism and Liberation. She served as a treasurer for the Gloria La Riva 2016 Presidential Campaign, and has been part of Bay Area actions for racial justice since the murder of Oscar Grant in 2009. During the pandemic she was a fierce organizer of the Cancel the Rents campaign, which urged the government to provide immediate relief for people who had been laid off and could not afford their housing. In recent years, while serving as the trustee of the Bay Area Liberation Center, Meghann has continued her work as an anti-war organizer, contributing to Block the Boat at Oakland Port actions and continuous protests to end the genocide in Gaza. As a working class fighter, Meghann sees the struggles of the working class as inherently connected, tying back to the systematic protection of the interests of the wealthy elite at the expense of working people and the environment. 

An officer of the Peace and Freedom Party, Meghann is determined to make the people’s needs the priority of the California state budget, and address the climate crisis with urgency. California is the 4th largest economy in the world. As state profits are used to line the pockets of the wealthy, Meghann’s decades of experience in speaking out against the war machine and her resolute dedication to working people make her the clear choice for voters who want a change to business as usual—to end poverty in California!