Shelia Browning-Peuchaud

Sheila Browning-Peuchaud, Ph.D is a public servant at heart. She has been a Peace Corps volunteer, a Fulbright Scholar, a civics educator with the Close Up Foundation in Washington, DC, and a professor of Journalism at the American University in Cairo and at the University of Nevada Reno. Through it all, the constant theme has been striving toward the American democratic ideals of transparency in government, active citizenship, and social justice.

Sheila grew up in Michigan as the youngest of eight children. She earned her BA from the University of Michigan in Asian Studies and Creative Writing, her MA in Journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and her Ph.D in Journalism, with a specialty in Health Communication, from the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.

Sheila lives in Reno with her husband, a proud naturalized American of French origin, her two children, who both attend Washoe County Public Schools, a bossy Egyptian street cat, and a timid Miniature American Shepherd. When she is not campaigning, you can find her driving her kids to swimming, ballet, Scouts, up on the slopes of Mt. Rose, or out for a run.

• First Core Value: Transparency and Ethics As a journalism professor, I taught courses such as Principles of American Journalism, Media Ethics, and Media and Society. Democracy depends on open meetings, public records, and general transparency about all forms of influence. The public must be informed so they have the opportunity to discern how policy might affect them, organize their response, and weigh in early and often. Ethics are not a set of rules that an elected official or candidate can skirt around. Ethics means setting aside personal gain in favor of the public interest, every time. Ethics means weighing all the potential harms and benefits to all stakeholders and making decisions with care, especially for the most vulnerable.
• Second Core Value: Commitment to Service Running for public office implies a commitment to serve in public office. If elected, I will serve the whole term, and if other members of City Council resign, I will call for special elections rather than an appointment process. As a citizen, I have been concerned about the number of City Council members who’ve resigned and been replaced by appointments. This undermines democracy twice: the appointees are not necessarily accountable to the people they represent, and they are beholden to the other council members who appointed them.
• Third Core Value: Building Healthy Community Healthy Community encompasses several aspects: It’s meeting that everyone’s basic need for shelter and safety, then going beyond that and caring for our mental and physical wellbeing by investing in our parks, neighborhoods, and streets. It’s making choices that benefit our health and environment, to ensure clean air, water, and food systems. It’s communicating across difference with civility and working together to find the best solutions to our community’s challenges.

Homelessness and the Environment

My background is in journalism, so some of the films that guide my political philosophy are All The President’s Men (1976) and Spotlight (2015). The public should know when their powerful institutions are too cozy.

Ethics: Putting the public Interest above self-interest. Being an honorable steward of public resources.

Public Service Mindset: If service is beneath you, leadership is beyond you.

Leading with Listening: Really caring about what the people need and want, and brining people together to find solutions.

City Council is responsible to the citizens of today and tomorrow, by providing a defining vision of the City. The core responsibilities of the City Council are to set priorities, manage the budget, and address issues facing Reno. This means ensuring public safety through police and fire emergency services, planning development and growth, addressing homelessness and mental health, stewarding our public parks and recreation areas.

I was 8 years old, in 3rd grade, when the Challengers blew up. There had been an enormous build-up about sending a teacher into space, so we all knew that this was supposed to be a new era of space exploration for regular people.

We didn’t watch it live (in retrospect, I suspect it’s because my school didn’t have the audio-visual equipment to organize that) but after recess, my teacher, Sister Marilyn, told us all what happened. Because it was a Catholic School, we prayed for the astronauts’ souls and for their grieving families.

The next day, I remember kids telling insensitive jokes they’d heard on the radio, and Sister Marilyn talking to us about how jokes like that can make us feel better in the face of hard things, but urged us to consider how they dehumanized suffering. Our moral education was about considering the feelings of others, and caring for one another.

I was a student bus driver while attending the University of Michigan.

They trained me to get my Commercial Driver’s License, Class B, with air brakes and passenger endorsement - which I still have! I drove the commuter buses - 45 feet long, 9 feet wide, holding up to 80 passengers at rush hour, through snow and ice in the winter and heat and humidity in the summer. The route went from the athletic campus south of campus, through main campus, around the medical campus, and up to the arts and engineering campus in the north.

Over the course of the day, I interacted with soon-to-be-famous athletes (I was there at the same time as Tom Brady and wonder if he ever rode my bus), students like myself, the whole hierarchy of medical staff, artists, musicians, and engineers.

Back at the bus depot, I had close professional relationships with the dispatchers, the union drivers, the other student drivers who came from all walks of life and would go on to all manner of careers, and the custodial staff.

As an exposure to a cross-section of the hardworking people who make up this country, it was the best part of my college education.

Empathy and critical thinking. Empathy is the ability and desire to meet people where they are and truly care for them. Critical thinking is the ability to process complex information, some of which may be contradictory, and come up with creative solutions to difficult problems. My life experience and professional accomplishments speak to both.

I believe in radical transparency. Every public penny for the public good. The public should be able to see, clearly, and in plain terms, how every public penny is spent.