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Meet Virginia Stapleton

Growing Up

I grew up in a very large family with eleven siblings. My parents met as children when my mother was living with her family in southern California. Circumstances changed for her family and she moved back to her home state of Texas. My dad continued to write to her nearly everyday and when she moved back to California they began dating and were soon married and started their family. They moved to Oregon in 1971 and bought their first home in Keizer, Oregon.
That’s where my story begins. I was born in 1981 at the old Salem Hospital, number 8 in what would eventually be 12 children. With a family this large you’re split into groups, we had three distinct groups, the four oldest whose childhood was marked by home-made clothes and canned goods, the middle four, which I was the youngest of, who were your typical middle children running wild and free, and the four youngest, spoiled by all accounts.
People often ask me what it was like to be raised in such a large family and I often say it’s just the same as yours except the good times were that much better and the hard times, that much worse. My upbringing taught me how to work hard and live a life of service. We were taught how to have eyes to see the needs around us and then to quietly meet those needs without any fanfare. We were a religious family and spent most of our free time at the church, often going to church three times a week and volunteering untold hours to the different projects and mundane maintenance of the church.
My dad worked as a salesman and my mom was at home with the children. We often went without, but we never knew any different, so the trials of life often felt like an adventure. That attitude has served me well over the years and I know I have my parents, especially my mom, to thank for that outlook.
I will admit that we have a long way to go in our public school system but when I look back at my experience I realize just how far we’ve come and I’m very thankful. My years in our education system were fraught but they gave me a unique perspective, if not experience.
I attended school at Brush College Elementary in West Salem. I don’t have a lot of memories of that time but I know my attendance was low and my grades were average. I suffered many traumatic experiences in life and my go-to, built in tool was dissociation which caused me to not hold onto many of the experiences of childhood. My mother kept me and my sister home from middle school in order to help her around the house and when I turned of age I was dropped off at North Salem High School.
Unbenongest to me, I had a couple of learning disabilities that had not been diagnosed and made learning a challenge. Add to that my skill of dissociation and lack of attendance and you have a recipe for failure, according to the district. It was during this first year at North that my parents transferred us to Perrydale High School, just west of Salem about 20 miles. That’s where I met my future husband, Isaak at the young age of 14 yrs old.
I ended up dropping out of high school as a sophomore. I often say that when you are poor you idolize work and that’s what I did. I went out and got a few different service jobs and worked hard. Those years taught me many things but I never lost my love of learning. I taught myself to read, completing my first chapter book at the age of 18. I always knew I’d go back to school but knew I’d never do it the traditional way.

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Young Married Life and Kids

The early years of our marriage were spent trying to make ends meet. Isaak was a student at Chemeketa and then OSU and I worked at Valley Recycling Inc to pay the bills. We moved from our duplex in South Central Salem to the farm in Perrydale, living in a shop apartment to save money.
We celebrated Isaak’s graduation by quitting our jobs and selling everything we owned so we could take the trip of a lifetime, a 3 month trip backpacking and couch surfing around Europe. This trip turned out to be life changing for me.
Upon returning home we both got new jobs and worked hard to buy our first home which was in Englewood in northeast Salem. I can remember people telling me, “that’s a great place to buy and have a young family, but you’ll want to move before they get to middle or high school”, and I saw that happen many times during my time in that neighborhood, it always bothered me. I wanted our family to be deeply rooted in our neighborhood and that included our public schools.
Our time in Europe started a fierce need in me, one for community and connection. It started with Isaak and I meeting and getting to know our neighbors, hosting the Neighborhood Night Out for our block, and later turned into Sunday Suppers, where we’d cook a large pot of soup and open our home to the neighborhood for a time of connection. Later, when our children were in elementary school I would join and lead the Parent-Teacher Club, working hard to raise money for the kids field trips, supplies for classrooms and new books for the library.
That work would put me in connection with city and school leaders that were instrumental in getting the changes our neighborhood and school needed. I served on the Salem-Keizer School Boards Budget Committee and worked with city leaders to install new sidewalks and upgrade a dangerous crosswalk that connected our neighborhood with our school. I started to see and understand things that had been unclear before, a way for me to make a difference in the lives of young people all around me.
When our kids were 7 and 9 we moved to be closer to our middle and high school, being able to work to school and work was a driving force behind the move. Now our kids could walk to school without having to cross a major street. That didn’t stop me from trying to improve transportation options for all and while advocating for such improvements.

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Virginia and Isaak's first rental in South Central Salem

Virginia and Isaak on his graduation day

Isaak and Virginia signing for their first home

Virginia, Isaak, and Aliza on a camping trip

Time on Council

I decided to run for Salem City Council in the fall of 2019 with a team of volunteers and a shoestring budget. It was a time of firsts, first debate, first time canvassing, first time doing house parties to raise money. But through all those firsts was an excitement about the possibilities, I had little understanding (yet) of the heartache and challenges of governing.
My campaign finished after COVID had hit so my time late in the campaign was spent on the phones talking with neighbors and voters. It was a serial time to be alive. I was sworn in online and didn’t go to an in person meeting for the first two years of my term.
Although times were challenging that did not stop us from facing the hard work of governing while experiencing a massive increase in our unhoused population. When I took office we had hundreds of people living on our streets, surrounding whole city blocks in downtown Salem. We moved quickly to use federal dollars to set up low barrier shelters around the city, including our Navigation Center. Since that time we’ve seen hundreds moved off our streets and into stable housing.
We worked hard to pass a $300 million dollar infrastructure bond that made a generational investment in our city, from emergency preparedness to streets and roads, future library locations and our first ever investment in our parks. It felt amazing to be a part of that work.
During that time we also looked at our housing needs analysis and moved to change our zoning laws to make building housing easier and more affordable. We changed parking requirements and cut through red tape. We focused our efforts along transit routes and worked to include our goals included in the Climate Action Plan which was one of the first things we adopted during my term. Over those four years in office I voted to approve over four thousand housing units!
One of my focuses on Council was on lowering and eventually ending deaths in our transportation system. I worked hard to pass Vision Zero and Twenty Is Plenty, I made a motion to implement Pedistrain Lead Intervals in our downtown core and started our intersection art program. All of these programs work together to create a safer experience for anyone on our roads and although we have a lot of work to do to continue this work, I know we’re on the right path to get it done.
It was during this same time that I started to collaborate with Ian Davidson and Dylan McDowell to create Salem Bike Vision. Through our efforts there we’ve secured millions of investment to protect vulnerable road users and open up transportation options for many. You can see more about my work at www.salembikevision.org.
Ever since I started to run for City Council I started getting questions about the city’s budget. I quickly learned more than I’d ever known about measures 5 and 50, state-wide measures passed in the 90’s that changed how Oregonians paid for public services. It resulted in cuts at the local level across the entire state. Local governments have never recovered and the needs in our communities have changed and increased dramatically. By the time we began to work on this issue, I was serving as Council President and was asked to lead this effort. We had to do everything we could to protect existing services like police, Fire and EMS; our parks and local library as well as our services for our unhoused neighbors - an issue we had just recently made so much progress in. A city committee made up of community members put forward several ideas and we got consensus around the payroll tax. This immediately got pushback from the Chamber of Commerce and some community members. We worked hard to try and communicate the need to the community, but the idea ultimately failed. You can hear more about this topic on my podcast, Demobrats. With the failure of the proposal we were back to square one and set to make $16 million in cuts.
Through this whole process I learned how fundamentally broken our tax structure is and that you can only do so much at the city level. If I wanted to create lasting change, I’d need to run for State office.

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Canvassing with Aliza for Ward 1 on City Council

Virginia and Mayor Chris Hoy bike canvassing to pass the 300M infrastructure bond

Virginia and her family at her desk at City Council

Last night of City Council representing Ward 1

Running for State House District 21

You couldn’t find any two people more different than Kevin and I, he’s been in politics since the time I was born, I was fairly new to the role. Kevin’s claim to fame are things like Measure’s 5 and 50 and the notorious mandatory sentencing law, Measure 11, all of which passed in the 90’s. He used to be a democrat and was now a republican - serving as the chair of the Republican Party of Oregon for a time. I grew up a republican and became a democrat. He wants to cut programs and taxes for the wealthy and I want our government to invest in those programs to help working families and small businesses, not wealthy individuals and big businesses.
We had a joyful campaign, making light of all the hate mail, hosting a retirement party for Kevin as a fundraiser, and making all kinds of content online. We knocked more doors than I thought humanly possible and I talked to voters every day. We did it the old fashioned way, but with so much joy. Kevin spent over a million dollars to beat me and he did so by only 1,100 votes. It was heartbreaking to lose, but we gave it our all and our team did an amazing job. Our work was not a complete loss, because the Democrats won a supermajority in the legislature, and Oregonians would be represented, even in Donald Trump’s America.

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Speaking at a canvass kick off while running for HD 21

Looking Ahead

Turns out, I really care about my community and fighting for those who are considered to be the under-dogs. I finally stopped asking “why do I care so much?” and decided that I love that I care this much, and I think you should care this much too!