It’s the last Friday of March — though the days of the week all run together during a pandemic — and Phara Souffrant Forrest is in her Brooklyn apartment, on a call with 60 organizers from across the state, strategizing about the movement to freeze rent. “Tenants who’ve been out of work for three weeks can’t pay rent,” Forrest told Teen Vogue about the effort to provide relief for those cash-strapped by the COVID-19 outbreak.

Forrest later hops on a mutual aid call with other renters in her Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights to discuss how best to help their elderly and vulnerable neighbors get their groceries and prescriptions without having to risk the dystopian new world. Between these calls, and another with the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) on pushing for health care and housing for all, Forrest dials up her neighbors and friends. She wanted to notify them about the rent strike and the neighborhood aid circle and, “by the way,” the fact that she’s running to represent the state’s 57th Assembly District in the Democratic primary election, which was moved from April to June 23 because of the crisis.

“I don’t know anymore where my campaign starts and stops and where the movement starts and stops. It’s just one big push,” said Forrest, 31, who identifies as Haitian American.

Forrest is quick to dispel the assumption that the pandemic has somehow dashed her dreams for a grassroots victory over incumbent Democrat Walter Mosley. “You think this COVID-19 has got me stuck in this house? It’s got me thinking of ways to build and get this point across. I’m fired up. I know this movement is going to keep going.”

The movement, that is, for a working-class revolution to ensure just housing, health care, and labor conditions for all, led at the national level by presidential candidate and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, but fueled by hundreds of local and state-level candidates like Forrest.

If this movement has an umbrella organization, it would most likely be the DSA, which endorsed Forrest along with five other candidates for seats in the New York State Legislature, and made waves in recent years backing progressive insurgent candidates like Sanders and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. For Forrest, Democratic socialism is simply “the fundamental belief that the power in our whole society should be in the hands of the working class,” she said.

Before Forrest halted in-person campaigning earlier in March, a coalition of more than 400 volunteers had knocked on more than 21,000 doors for her in the district, which includes the neighborhoods of Prospect Heights, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, and parts of Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Now in a pandemic-ridden world, Forrest is mobilizing those same volunteers through near-daily phone banks and fireside chats with her fellow DSA-approved candidate Jabari Brisport, who is running to unseat an established Brooklyn representative in the New York State Senate.

The crisis at hand hits particularly close to home for Forrest because she’s a union nurse. She tells Teen Vogue that if you asked someone in her profession five years ago, they could have told you the city was desperately short on ventilators, the life-saving machines needed for those suffering dire respiratory effects from the coronavirus. The present failure to provide adequate medical care for all who are and will become sick from the coronavirus is a product of the absence of nurses, and more generally of the working class, in the halls of power, said Forrest. “For too long the working class has been cut off from Albany, and here we are, paying for that ignorance.”