Since August, Usha Reddi has traveled 10,000 miles to carry her grassroots message to the Kansas citizens she hopes to represent in the U.S. Senate.

As an educator, a parent and a community leader, Reddi listens to those she meets on the campaign trail and can’t help but think how badly she wants to make a difference — for the family that can’t afford health care, for the farmer who wonders whether he can survive another year, for the teacher who invests in her students.

It’s more than politics for Reddi, a member of the Manhattan City Commission since 2013 and mayor pro tem.

“When you’re a city official, you don’t think in terms of being a Republican or a Democrat. You just go fix the pothole,” she said.

Reddi, 54, was in Ellsworth Saturday as a guest of local Democrats. She will be joined in the August 2020 primary by state Sen. Barbara Bollier of Johnson County and Robert Tillman of Wichita, who campaigned unsuccessfully in 2012 for Congress.

If elected, Reddi would be the first Hindu in Congress, the first women of color from Kansas in the U.S. Senate and the first Kansas Democrat elected to the Senate since 1932.

None of these “firsts” seem to overwhelm Reddi.

She points to Democrats Laura Kelley and Sharice Davids, both Democrats.

Voters are looking for a different kind of candidate, Reddi said.

Davids is the first openly LGBT person to represent Kansas and one of the first two Native American women elected to Congress. She has received high marks for her work ethic since she took office this past January.

Issues have changed since the state’s two U.S. Republican senators, Jerry Moran and retiring Pat Roberts, went to Washington, Reddi said.

Reddi believes representatives should be reaching out to farmers, teachers, minorities, mental health advocates and others to talk about the development of a work force to carry the country forward into the next 10 to 20 years, access to broadband in remote rural areas, creation of affordable health care, an umbrella that includes mental health services, and other concerns she hears from voters and has experienced personally.

Frustration with Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and the policies she champions is one of the reasons she became a candidate, said Reddi, a union leader at Ogden Elementary School, where she is on a year’s leave of absence to campaign.

As for health care, she is open to discussion, including about Medicare for all.

“Let’s do this; let’s do this right,” Reddi said.

Reddi, who came to the United States from India when she was 8 years old, said her two proudest accomplishments in Manhattan, are the establishment of a new crisis mental health center and the city’s decision to add sexual orientation and gender identity to its non-discrimination ordinance in 2016.

As a senator, Redd said she would rely on the same method of cooperation and practical compromise she uses as a city official. It’s an often slow, but steady process forward.

“I’m not there for the glory or the headlines ... I’m there to get it done and move on to the next thing.

“I have a lot of passion for it — it never feels like work. It just feels like something I want to do.”