Meet Carleigh.

Carleigh is an educator and scholar, a union organizer, and vice chair of the local Select Board. She’s also the mom of two awesome kids and a fierce advocate for people in need everywhere. With a record of fighting righteous fights and winning, Carleigh wants to go to DC to fight for all Granite Staters.

Today, Carleigh lives in Hampton with her high school sweetheart (a public middle school teacher), two kids and two dogs, but Carleigh's story starts on the Jersey Shore, where she was shaped by spirited annual extended family gatherings, hard-working parents, and a Catholic upbringing that taught her to care for others - and to question authority. From an early age, Carleigh learned to listen, to lead, and to speak up when something wasn’t right.

After graduating from Mount Holyoke College in three years, Carleigh followed her love for teaching and public service to the Marshall Islands, where she taught at a public school in a community still grappling with the legacy of U.S. nuclear testing and confronting climate change. Teaching and working for the Ministry of Education there sharpened her sense that it’s not enough to critique what’s broken - and her desire to imagine and build something better. The experience fueled her later academic scholarship and advocacy on behalf of at-risk communities.

Returning to the U.S., Carleigh earned her M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School in Religion, Ethics, and Politics and her Ph.D. from Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in the Study of Religion.

As a graduate student, she worked in libraries, as a home health aid, as a teaching fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and as a researcher. She was also an activist, successfully helping lead the effort to unionize Harvard graduate student workers and negotiating for better working conditions, including parental leave and anti-retaliation policies in order to ensure all student workers, regardless of their background or status, have adequate institutional support while they produce groundbreaking scholarship.

After the 2016 election, Carleigh moved with her husband to the New Hampshire Seacoast. She wanted to live in a place that was ideologically and economically diverse with a vibrant culture of political engagement. Since 2022, she has worked as an adjunct lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of government where she teaches about the intersections of public policy, politics, and religion as it relates to immigration, the environment, economics, labor, abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, education, religious nationalism, polarization, tribal sovereignty, and foreign affairs. She also serves as the Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies in Religion at Harvard College. Students seek out her classes as a place to engage thoughtfully and courageously with complex issues of history, faith, and power.

More recently, Carleigh has brought her lifetime of advocacy to local government, working to elect Democrats across New Hampshire and winning a seat on the Hampton Select Board. On the Select Board, Carleigh has been an outspoken advocate for fair school funding, climate resilience, clean water, affordable housing, prudent investments in public services, and civil rights in the face of infringement from the Trump administration. Carleigh represents a purple town where she is known for always “doing her homework” and her willingness to work with anyone who wants to collaborate in good faith to make things better for people in the community. When the local newspaper asked a voter to explain why she had voted for Carleigh, she replied that she “looks for candidates who are sharp, informed, dedicated, civil, reasonable, and ‘not crazy.’ Carleigh is a person who supersedes all those categories…She’s a rock star.”

Whether she’s waltzing into a senator’s office to ask about nuclear policy, protesting cuts to public education in Concord, confronting big corporations seeking to exploit her community, or making sure that the neighborhood kid whose mom works the night shift always gets breakfast and a ride to school, Carleigh leads with purpose, humility, and humor. As she reminds her students, policy is about people.

Carleigh shows up for everyone: for the queer kids, for the new parents, and for the people who think and believe things she does not. She is fearless, literally wading across shark-infested channels (ask her about it) when necessary, to fight for what is right and for the people around her.

Now, Carleigh wants to bring that fight to Congress, to make sure we have a representative who understands our struggles and stands up for our values - a representative who listens and leads with integrity and tenacity. Just as she has her whole life.