A previous version of this article misstated the year that the Lancaster, Ohio mayoral elections will be held. The elections will be held in 2019, not in 2020.
Tiffany Piko, a 22-year-old Parsons senior, is running for mayor of her hometown, Lancaster, Ohio in the 2019 elections. “Tiff,” as she’s known, said she has always wanted to run for office in Lancaster. “I was so fed up with the way that our government was being run and who was representing us,” she said. “It was mostly male, mostly older, and I didn’t think that was representative of the entire populace.”
Piko is running unopposed in the Democratic Primary, and if she were to win the general election against incumbent Republican Mayor David Scheffler
Piko’s run for mayor also happens to be her thesis project for her undergraduate degree in Fashion Design. Timo Rissanen, Professor of Fashion Design and Sustainability at Parsons, who has advised and taught Piko in the past, helped develop the “systems” track within the major for the purpose of tackling problems on a system-wide level.
Piko’s campaign, he says, fits right into that vision. “I see huge value in people with a design education being elected officials, particularly the way we teach design at Parsons,” he said. “It’s a great tool for problem solving.”
After speaking with Lancaster residents about her candidacy for mayor, Piko identified three major issues she wants to run on: First, she plans to bring city-wide recycling services to Lancaster for the first time. “I’ve learned so much about sustainable infrastructure at the New School which will be so cool to implement in Lancaster,” she said. Second, Piko believes in community representation — the idea that every part of her hometown should be thriving and participating in municipal affairs. Finally, Piko wants to reimagine the way that Lancaster handles victims of drug abuse, a widely-reported nationwide epidemic that she says must be treated as a disease and not as a crime. “We don’t include people who are directly affected in the conversation,” she said.
Determined to include all of Lancaster in her campaign, Piko has set a high bar for herself. “One of my design challenges with my thesis project is that I wanted to meet as many people in Lancaster as possible. Ideally, the whole forty thousand,” she said. In addition to the social activism and government design aspects of Piko’s project, she has also started a podcast called Oisms where she speaks with different leaders within the Lancaster community, including coaches, teachers, and businesspeople.
“Her work exemplifies exactly what art can contribute to social justice and ecological issues,” said Jean Gardner, a professor of Social-Ecological History and Design at Parsons and an environmental activist. Gardner says Piko’s activism in Lancaster resonates “not only with our rational minds but also stirs our hearts, often leading to meaningful change.”
Following her announcement, Piko was met with support from residents of Lancaster and those around her at the New School. “There were so many young girls and women in general who messaged me when I announced, and then came up to me after the announcement saying that they were so inspired seeing a woman run for mayor of Lancaster,” said Piko.
Piko is receiving political support by the the Main Street Initiative, a group that was created and run by the Ohio Democratic County Chairs Association, and is specifically geared toward diversity in the democratic process. They work with “candidates and campaign volunteers of various backgrounds and experience levels,” according to their website, “including those who are brand new to the political process.”
Focused on sustainable and renewable fashion, Piko also runs her online clothing resale business that she started in high school. Together with grants and merit-based scholarships, Piko has covered her entire education and housing in New York City for the four years of her degree with her own business, selling over eight thousand items in the last five years, or about 15,000 pounds of clothes.
A defining element of Piko’s campaign is a set of yellow suits that she is designing and producing. Piko appears in her official campaign photo in one of these suits. She explained that she drew inspiration from a beloved comic, Hogan’s Alley, who’s creator is a Lancaster native. The comic featured “a tenement boy who wore a yellow nightgown, and whenever he spoke, the text would appear on his dress. I recreated that dress and a lot of people know me for it in Lancaster,” she said. “I always called it Lancaster’s Yellow Dress.”
One of Piko’s friends, Alice Ly, a recent graduate of the New School, said Piko’s friends and peers always envisioned her doing something like this. “When she announced she was running for Mayor, I thought it was the craziest thing in the world, and yet also kind of made sense,” said Ly. “She’s the type of kid that your parents would hope you were. She’s artistic, she cares about people, she cares about politics, and she does everything at one hundred percent. She’s one of those kids.”
Growing up in small-town Ohio, in a biracial family with a dad from West Virginia and a mom from Tahiti who speaks almost no English, Piko was determined to include as much of Lancaster as she can in her campaign. She strongly believes that she can reach voters and energize her community without any campaign funding. “I love this idea that she’s going to run a zero-cost campaign,” said Brendan McCarthy, one of Piko’s thesis advisors at Parsons in Fashion Design. “Of course from a budgeting perspective it’s brilliant but it also means that she has to collaborate.”
Piko’s campaign is entirely run by volunteers, people both in her New York community and back home in Lancaster. “She’s really helping people understand what their personal worth is, their true value, and how much more valuable we are as a united group than a group of individuals,” said McCarthy.
Many around her, as well as Piko herself, understood from the start that in some respects this campaign would be an uphill battle against people’s preconceived notions of politicians and what their identities have almost always been in the past. “I think people are just skeptical of young people running for any office, having someone so young, especially a woman,” said her friend Alice Ly. But even in the face of this inevitable ugliness and backlash, “she has a strength of character that transcends all of that,” said Timo Rissanen, which, he says, gives her the unique ability to maintain an unrelentingly open approach to meeting people, and winning them over. “I want this whole project to be positive and to be about uplifting Lancaster,” Piko said. But whatever happens in the election, Piko is adamant that her activism in Lancaster and her work in fashion will continue no matter what.
Piko feels strongly that part of that engagement has to do with getting people to understand that, as mayor, she would want and need the work and support of the whole community. “A lot of people expect mayors to fix potholes, fix the taxes, and one person can’t do that and shouldn’t be able to do that,” said Piko. “We need a diverse group of people fixing these problems, and so as mayor I want to see that happen.”
Although she has spent the last four years in Manhattan learning all she can about fashion and design systems, Piko says living in New York was always meant to be temporary. “I always wanted to take what I learned here and bring back to Ohio,” she said. Despite all the positive aspects of New York, Piko explained that moving away from her family was never easy. “I was so family-oriented,” she said, “especially with my little sister who was 5 years old when I moved away. I’m excited to move back and be with my family again.”
“I always joke with Tiffany that she’s almost too nice to be in politics,” McCarthy said. “No matter the challenges she faces, she meets them with love. It’s always love first, it’s always about how to find the good in someone.”
This truly is Piko’s approach to running for mayor as well as seemingly everything else she does. “Time is precious,” said Piko,“and there’s so many things to do and so many people to help.”
