A strange, perfect storm that included a pandemic and west coast wildfires directed Brittany Hume Charm’s path to Newton. The sense of community she and her family found is what made her stay.

With the country and the world in a state of volatility and change, Charm is hoping to help her adopted community navigate fiscal uncertainty, find ways to foster joy locally and turn down the rhetorical heat.

“I think a lot about what I call ‘third spaces,’ the places that aren’t work or school or home… like the Upper Falls Splash Park or the parks like this one here, and fields and the playgrounds, or the Senior Center or the library,” Charm said as she walked along the trails in Cold Spring Park waving at other walkers on what was the first comfortable day after a heatwave. “Every Friday night, my family goes to the Hyde concert. And to be able to see your neighbors face-to-face in real life on foot, there’s something about that that helps you realize that we are all just normal people trying to do our best, and I think that can help to turn down the heat and the vitriol.”

Charm has worked in global health for 20 years, structuring partnerships and collaborations across corporate, philanthropic, technology and government sectors to increase access to healthcare in developing countries. Now she’s running for one of two Ward 5 at-large seats in this year’s local election, hoping to build partnerships across the city she’s come to call home.

Finding Newton in a storm

Charm was born and raised Louisville, Ky, and left to attend Princeton and then lived in New York for five years. She later headed to the University of California at Berkeley for her MBA and lived in San Francisco for more than a decade.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, along with some apocalyptic wildfires, oddly enough it inspired her and her husband, Phil, to plan another move.

“At that point, we had a 2-year-old living in a small condo in the middle of San Francisco during the pandemic, during the wildfires, and we realized we really want to be close to grandparents,” Charm said.

Her husband is from Massachusetts (Concord, to be exact), so the couple decided to move to the Bay State. And they were drawn to Newton.

“I think like many families, we were considering, first, the schools,” Charm said. “My husband and I both went through public schools, and that was really important to us. And  we also loved the sort of medium density of Newton, it’s walkable, and you had these really engaging, charming village centers. But then there’s also green space like this, and then, of course, the access to Boston and being able to get to a major international airport, or to hop on the T and get to downtown, to be able to do interesting cultural things and to get to major work centers.”

What was it like moving during a global pandemic with social-distancing requirements?

“It was a crazy, crazy experience,” Charm recalled. “I did not see the house that we moved into until the day before we closed. I was out in San Francisco with a 2-year-old. We were trying to house hunt at a time when houses were selling in a single weekend. And so my husband was the first one in our household who was vaccinated, and he started doing crazy trips, flying red-eyes on Friday night, landing Saturday morning, doing two days of house hunting.”

With homes in high demand, that meant looking at a lot of homes over a lot of those hectic weekends until they found their home in Waban in 2021.

“I was really a leap of faith,” Charm said. “And it turned out we got here and got settled and realized that we had really found our village, both sort of figuratively and literally.”

Stepping up for local office

Four years later, she decided to take another leap of faith and run for a City Council seat.

“I really want to protect and help to positively shape this community that is the village that is raising my kids along with me, and this is the community that we will be a part of,” Charm said, stopping to pet a golden retriever. “And I think that level of investment really got heightened for me in November when Trump won the election, and it began to feel like everything was under attack.”

Charm serves as an Executive Fellow in Boston’s Office of Economic Opportunity and Inclusion, helping Greater Boston communities innovate their economies. And she has two decades of experience—including running her own consulting company before starting her current role in Boston earlier this year—helping businesses and organizations problem-solve.

And given the chaos in the federal government and the cuts coming from Beacon Hill, Charm wants to put those skills to work in local elected office.

“I began to shift my lens to say, ‘Okay, I can’t change things that are happening at a global level. I can’t change things that are happening at a national level, but I can help to reinforce and protect, and steer this my own community through the next several years, which are going to be bumpy,” she said.

Newton has already seen some big bumps in its road, fiscally. When Charm’s son was in preschool in 2023, voters rejected an override to fill budget gaps for the next fiscal year. When he was in kindergarten, teachers went on strike demanding more funding for school staff and programs. And this year, with her son in first grade, Newton saw another budget crisis involving school funding and city revenues.

“And as a resident of Newton, I wanted to better understand: Where is this crisis coming from? What are the root causes of this? I understand that there’s the immediate request of shifting money from one line item to the other. But how did we get to this place? And so I began to, in a very nerdy way, start to dig in,” she explained.

Bumpy fiscal roads

Charm would learn that the fiscal uncertainty in Newton isn’t a school thing. It’s a budgeting issue in all departments. Health insurance costs are increasing at nearly four times the rate of revenues. The cost of construction and building repair has gone up in the past few years, along with the cost of gas and everything else.

“And so if you just look at the basic math, we are going to have to be cutting the status quo of what we’re doing to be able to continue to pay those bills,” Charm said. “So how do we think about the medium and long-term solutions to these budget crises that can help us get out of this cycle?”

And then there’s the anticipation of what’s to come from the new Trump administration. Charm, with her experience in global health, was especially upset by the president’s executive order effectively shuttering USAID. And now Newton could potentially lose millions in federal funding due to DOGE cuts and Trump administration penalties for being a sanctuary city with diversity, equity and inclusion programs. And some are afraid the city could be left in chaos.

“I don’t want that to happen here,” Charm said. “So how can we help to keep this place as welcoming as it felt when I moved here, and to be able to make sure that we continue to have the city services and schools and resources that we need to be able to get through this and have our city still be strong and vibrant?”

For starters, Charm says the city should renegotiate its pension payment schedule. Newton has gotten nine years ahead of the 2040 deadline for payoff, so starting in 2032 the city will suddenly have tens of millions of dollars in newly freed-up money. But with times getting tough, many are calling on the city to push its pension payoff back a few years so the city and the schools can have more money now.

The pension payoff plan is managed by a special board, and the mayor would have to go to them to request an adjustment.

“I think it’s really important that we look closely at how to have that negotiation and to prioritize that, because that can help to give us a little bit of extra breathing room,” Charm said.

She’s also sure the city is going to need a Proposition 2 ½ tax levy override in the next few years but wants the city to try every other fiscal option first because “our residents are being hit on all sides right now.”

“So the educational and medical industries are being absolutely attacked right now by the Federal administration, and those are major drivers of the economy in Newton, and that’s just one example,” Charm said. “But also, many of our seniors and other residents who rely on some of the social safety net services could see those cut, and people’s health care expenses are going to be going up.”

Kate Wiggin, left, Lila Harper, middle, and Brittany Charm, right, speak with voters about Charm’s campaign for City Council at Newton Highlands Village Day on June 8, 2025. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

Housing and development

New growth is not factored into Proposition 2 ½, so adding new housing and businesses to the tax base is one way to increase revenue without going to existing taxpayers for an override. And Charm sees it as a vital medium and longer-term solution to Newton’s budget problems.

“There are financial and economic arguments to say that this is a way to be able to get the resources we need as a community without going into people’s individual pocketbooks at a time when that is increasingly painful,” Charm said.

She also sees new growth as a way to diversify the city’s housing stock to meet diverse needs.

“Many people in Newton are realizing that it is really hard to have their kids move back here [as adults] or they are older adults who may be getting ready to downsize, and they can’t find anything to downsize to,” Charm said. “I think it would be devastating for someone who has lived in Newton for 40 years or longer to say, ‘OK I need to get out of my home for safety reasons, but I can’t find a place to live that is closer than 45 minutes away that I can afford.”

Charm also wants to draw in more businesses to add to the city’s tax base, and she said that may require cutting some of the city’s red tape and streamlining permitting processes as well as fostering affordable housing development for workers in order to make Newton more business-friendly.

“We do need to be thinking about it as more of a competitive market,” she said. “We need to be looking at Newton alongside other towns around us.”

Newton’s election will be on Nov. 4. Charm is running unopposed, because there are two at-large seats and At-Large Councilor Andreae Downs is not running for reelection.