Norieliz DeJesus started organizing in Chelsea when she was fourteen years old. She ran the Chelsea City Council for two years. In January she handed the gavel to Roberto Jimenez-Rivera and took the vice presidency, and when she stood for re-election in District 3 in November 2025, not one person filed against her.
A Chelsea childhood
She is a Chelsea native and went to Chelsea public schools. Her mother raised her as a single parent working several jobs to keep their apartment in the city. She has described herself as a Chelsea girl, and the local paper used exactly that phrase as a headline when she first ran in 2021. She is a mother of three.
Organizing, from 2008 onward
She began as a youth organizer in 2008 and has worked in community engagement, organizing and advocacy ever since. She started working for Gladys Vega at fourteen.
She is now Director of Youth Programs at La Colaborativa, having previously served as its director of policy and organizing. Her own biography lists the campaigns rather than any degree: securing housing ordinances, passing affordable housing measures, expanding access to housing courts, and directing education funding into underserved districts.
She has also worked well beyond Chelsea, sharing organizing methods through the national Jobs with Justice coalition in California, Missouri, Texas and Washington.
That is an unusual position for a sitting councillor. She works professionally on the policy questions the council votes on, at an organization whose constituents are her constituents.
Where she landed on housing
The defining council argument of 2026 was the city manager’s proposal to loosen inclusionary zoning. The pitch was that easing it would spur building and generate tax revenue for schools facing a shortfall of about $6.6 million.
DeJesus did not line up cleanly on either side. In the April subcommittee debate she pressed the question underneath the argument: whether the existing ordinance was actually producing affordable housing, or whether it was mainly slowing gentrification. Those are different goals, and a policy can succeed at one while failing the other.
Coming from someone who has spent a career on housing campaigns, that is a pointed question rather than a rhetorical one.
When the ordinance came back on 25 June, the council approved it unanimously, but only after an amendment from Deron Hines passed 6 to 5. DeJesus was among the five who voted against that amendment, alongside Todd Taylor, Manuel Teshe, Calvin T. Brown and Leo Robinson.
What else she asks about
During the FY27 budget hearings in May she questioned Fire Chief John Quatieri about the department’s new resident assistance programme.
The presidency
Her colleagues elected her council president and kept her there for two years, through the end of 2025. The presidency in Chelsea is chosen by the council from among its own members, not by the voters, so it measures standing inside the building rather than at the ballot box. In January 2026 the council elected Jimenez-Rivera president and DeJesus vice president.
A note on a connection readers should know about. La Colaborativa is the largest community organization in Chelsea, in a city that is roughly 70 per cent immigrant, and it has been led since 2006 by Gladys Vega, now its president and chief executive. In a December 2021 Boston Globe piece on the rise of Latina officials in Chelsea, three of the four women profiled were related to or employed by Vega. Nothing about that is improper, and every one of them was elected on their own votes. It is simply a real feature of how power is organised in a small city, and worth stating plainly rather than leaving for someone to discover.
The numbers
She was first elected to the council in November 2021. District 3 was uncontested in the 4 November 2025 election, and her term runs through 2027.
The rest of the council is in our guide to all eleven members.
Update, September 14, 2026: How this councillor has voted and what they have filed in 2026, part of our council record series.