In Episode 7 of Gaslit: The Power of Story, I sat down with Cindi Clayton, and what unfolded was less a political interview and more a human inventory of where southwestern Indiana really stands and how we got here.

From the opening moments, Cindi made her “why” unmistakably clear. After more than a decade teaching at USI, she has watched students do everything they were told to do: get the grades, take the internships, graduate with a strong résumé, land a $50,000 job — and still be unable to afford to live independently in Evansville. They want to build a life here. Instead, they’re moving home because their first adult paycheck can’t keep up with rent, groceries, or utilities. We aren’t just losing graduates. We’re losing the future we claim to be building.

Cindi’s story isn’t theoretical. It’s lived experience. It’s a lifetime shaped by public schools, community care, working-class roots, and seeing firsthand what happens when families fall through the cracks. From being raised by teachers after her mother’s death, to watching the foster care system buckle under the same policies hurting everyone else, her perspective isn’t academic; it’s grounded in years of serving families on the front lines through Holly’s House, public education, and community advocacy.

And every thread of that experience points to the same conclusion: Indiana’s affordability crisis didn’t appear out of nowhere. It was built, slowly and quietly, through years of legislative decisions, and the people paying the price are children, teachers, seniors, and working families.

Cindi lays it out with clarity. We have a monopoly utility and a monopoly government — a combination that leaves ratepayers with no protection and no meaningful accountability. She drives home what many have been afraid to say plainly: the oversight system meant to defend residents simply isn’t functioning. The IURC has become a pass-through for decisions that benefit corporate shareholders while families, nonprofits, and local businesses absorb the fallout.

And while people are making impossible choices, heat or medicine, groceries or rent, the companies responsible are handing out perks to lawmakers, flying families to events, and treating the public like an afterthought. Meanwhile, public school funding has been chipped away piece by piece since 2008, child-welfare offices have been consolidated into scarcity, and families who rely on SNAP were plunged into crisis overnight when federal delays hit at the same time as rising energy bills.

Cindi calls it what it is: death by a thousand cuts, and for the people living closest to the edge, it’s not metaphorical. It’s material.

What stood out most in our conversation wasn’t anger; it was resolve. Cindi knows exactly what she’s stepping into, but she refuses corporate energy money as a matter of principle. Not as branding. Not as performance. As a line she won’t cross. She talks about servant leadership the way most people talk about family, because for her, they’re the same thing. The job is to listen, to show up, to teach people how their government works, and to bring their voices to Indianapolis with receipts.

And she makes it equally clear: we cannot fix affordability, child welfare, education, or utility costs without rebuilding trust. Trust that elected officials will answer the phone. Trust that transparency is the norm, not the exception. Trust that decisions affecting children won’t be made by people disconnected from their reality.

For her, leadership starts with showing up, in person, online, at events, in schools, in hearings, and reporting back to the people she serves. Not in newsletters written by interns. Not in sanitized press releases. In real time, face to face, the way good public servants used to do.

We’ve talked on this podcast with residents, small businesses, nonprofits, educators, parents, candidates, and organizers. Every conversation has pointed in the same direction: our region is struggling under decisions we did not make and outcomes we did not choose. What Cindi adds is the inside-out perspective, the understanding of how those decisions are built, who benefits from them, and how we change course.

If this series has taught us anything, it’s that silence is how we got here. People assumed someone else was watching. Someone else was fighting. Someone else was keeping the receipts. Cindi’s message lands the same way the others have: no one is coming to save us but us.

What happens next depends on whether we continue to tell these stories, share them, amplify them, and turn them into pressure that cannot be ignored. And whether we elect people willing to serve with integrity, not with access.

Cindi isn’t running for a title. She’s running because children deserve breakfast. Because families shouldn’t go hungry while waiting for court decisions. Because teachers deserve respect and a living wage. Because utility oversight shouldn’t be a rubber stamp. Because trauma shouldn’t define a child’s future. Because public service is supposed to mean something.

And because southwestern Indiana hasn’t just been overlooked, it’s been dismissed.

This conversation, like everyone in Gaslit, is a reminder that storytelling is social action. When people speak loudly, publicly, relentlessly, things move. And when candidates like Cindi rise from the community itself, backed by lived experience instead of corporate money, something shifts.

This is what it looks like when a community stops accepting harm as normal and begins demanding better.