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In the last decade, she says, the center's training and fund-raising efforts have helped 10,000 people, most with low incomes and limited education, launch small businesses in more than 200 communities in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. What began as a center in Roxbury has expanded to include state-subsidized centers in Worcester and Providence. It is little wonder, then, that economic development is the centerpiece of Silbert's pitch, a mix of results-oriented pragmatism and socially conscious idealism. Expanding commuter rail is not just environmentally responsible, she argues, it is a practical response to housing costs and traffic gridlock. Ending homelessness is not just a moral imperative, it is an economic investment. Preserving open space is not just aesthetically pleasing, it is a key to asset management.
``We can't leave politics to the rich and to professional politicians," Silbert says of Goldberg, heir to the Stop & Shop fortune, and Murray, the 37-year-old three-term mayor in Worcester. ``I have the political skills to identify a problem and to raise money from the public and private sectors to fix it. We have had to overcome more than one veto in the last few years at the center, but we have done it. I want to take what we have learned and apply it statewide."
It is her biography, as much as her resume, that Silbert hopes will connect with ordinary voters. She lives on Cape Cod not just because it is beautiful but also because she and her husband, a self-employed graphic designer and artist, could not afford housing prices closer to Boston. They buy their own health insurance, a solution that costs too much and provides too little coverage. Their children will go to public schools. ``We are living the life of so many middle-class families in Massachusetts," she says. ``We ought to have a voice at the State House."I couldn't have said it better myself.
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