After helping Paul Young's mayor campaign, how she plans to continue 'impact' in Memphis

After the “best week of (her) life,” Renee Parker Sekander isn’t tired. She’s energized.

The rising political star had a busy October. On Oct. 5, her candidate won the race for Memphis mayor. Three days later, she got married.

Now, Sekander is working as executive assistant to Mayor-elect Paul Young, with all her energy focused on heading to Jan. 1, when the Young administration will take charge in Memphis.

“Paul Young’s campaign to me was the epitome of a new generation of leadership that's ready to actually make an impact in a way that's going to shake the city up,” Sekander said in an interview with The Commercial Appeal earlier this month.

Just 28 years old, Sekander has worked on campaigns ranging from Amy McGrath’s Kentucky bid for U.S. Senate in 2020, Elizabeth Warren’s bid for president, also in 2020, and the latest runoff between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker to represent Georgia in the U.S. Senate.

A native Memphian who graduated from Hutchison School, Sekander moved away to attend the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Since her 2016 graduation, she’s lived in a variety of places, from Colorado to Kentucky to Georgia to California.

But she keeps coming back to Memphis.

One of her stints in California led to her meeting her now wife, Hennah Sekander, who returned to Memphis with Sekander and their dog, Miss Fox.

Now, the family identifies as Memphians, and Sekander is at work convincing other friends who’ve moved away to return.

“I have a lot of friends who are around the country, spread around, but still love Memphis,” Sekander said. “Things like electing Paul Young are hopeful and inspiring things that my friends are looking at. Hopefully, it will inspire them to come back and do the good work that they're doing abroad actually in our city.”

Knocking on thousands of doors

Sekander joined Young’s campaign for mayor as an engagement coordinator but soon became the campaign’s field director.

Young, never before elected, didn’t have the name recognition of some other top candidates, so Sekander worked to build out a field program that would bring his name directly to people’s front doors.

Some people told her it wasn’t safe to knock on doors in Memphis, but she built the program to do it anyway, instituting safety measures like check-ins and a buddy system. They didn’t have a single problem, she said.

“I don't believe in just giving up on having face-to-face conversations because of a perception of fear, or fear, or there’s some reality to it as well,” Sekander said.

The Young campaign ended up knocking on 31,000 doors, with about 20% of those leading to face-to-face conversations. When no one answered, canvassers left literature.

“We had lots of people, lots of people were undecided when we're knocking on their door, and a lot of times we would hear people say, no one has ever knocked on my door before or I've not seen anybody or heard any candidate try to get my vote,” Sekander said. To those voters, it meant something that Young had invested in field work, not just television and radio advertisements.

Sekander also built a distributed canvassing program that, through a phone app, showed canvassers where to find likely voters in close geographical proximity. People could use it in their own neighborhoods — leading to calling the program “Knock Your Neighborhood” — or wherever they happened to be at the moment.

That program spurred more volunteer interest and led to more people answering the door, she said.

Sekander said one thing that stood out to her about Young, who is currently the president of the Downtown Memphis Commission, was that he listened. When she said she thought they could knock on 30,000 doors, he told her to go ahead, and they succeeded.

It was a “life-changing experience to knock doors in Memphis, Tennessee,” Sekander said. “It was the hottest summer on record, so it was definitely sweaty, but lots of people offered me water, offered me drinks. One person in East Memphis offered me a whole dinner, and I accepted. … I want people to know that having conversations and talking to people goes such a long way.”

However, Sekander wasn’t always with Young’s campaign. For a short time, she was the campaign manager for Michelle McKissack.

Working for that campaign was the “wrong choice” and not “a good fit,” Sekander said.

“The second that I decided I didn’t believe in the race I was fighting for, I knew that I had to go and fight like hell to continue to stay in the fight, because it’s not about any of these candidates,” Sekander said. “It’s about actually making an impact in Memphis.”

Young would go on to win with about 4,500 more votes than his closest opponent, Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner.

Seeking to 'make an impact’ in Memphis

For Sekander, moving into politics was a natural progression through her life. She remembers challenging a professor in college who downplayed the reality of slavery. Her voice shook the entire time, she said, and she knew, “I want to be more confident when I talk about the things I’m really passionate about.”

That led to a job with Amnesty International, where she talked regularly about ethnic cleansing and famine, later with Organize TN and then on political campaigns.

More: What is Paul Young focusing on as he prepares to become the next mayor of Memphis?

“I've dedicated my entire life to trying to make an impact,” Sekander said. “So, coming back home in Memphis and working on Paul Young's campaign aligned with everything that I'm fighting for and everything that I'm trying to accomplish for my home city, and that's hopefully making an impact nationwide.”

In a way, the week of the election was a “full circle” moment for Sekander. Her wife ran the phone banks on Election Day, bringing back memories of how the two met on a phone bank in Los Angeles.

The election consumed so much of the couple’s time that they left most of the planning up to their wedding planner.

Thursday night, Young won the mayor’s office. Friday, Sekander slept in. Then Saturday, they started festivities leading up to the Sunday wedding at Shelby Farms. She and her wife combined their last names, Parker and Sekandary, coming up with “Sekander.”

“What better week to say I won the election and then I also won the best wife in the world,” Sekander said.

Now, Sekander isn’t giving any hints at what might be next for her, whether it’s working in the Young administration or working another campaign.

Her “only focus right now is working through January 1,” she said, with her role as Young’s executive assistant including supporting his transition team, approving subcommittee members and managing the mayor-elect’s calendar.

“I plan in kind of three months spurts right now,” Sekander said. “The whole focus is the transition team and making sure that we are developing the best actionable items that will actually shake up the things that we've been talking about for so long, education and safety and a lot of these issues that are driving people out of our city and also making people hesitant to come to our city. I just want to make an impact. So, I don't know what that's gonna look like, but wherever it leads me, it’s gonna be in Memphis.”

Katherine Burgess covers Memphis City Government and religion. She can be reached at katherine.burgess@commercialappeal.com or followed on X, formerly known as Twitter, @kathsburgess.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: How Renee Sekander plans to continue 'impact' in Memphis