Meet Estele

Estele Borges was just nine months old when her parents – a police officer and seamstress - came to America from the Santa Maria Island of the Azores in 1969 with nothing besides her mother’s sewing machine. Their dream upon going through the legal process to achieve citizenship in 1974 was to en sure their daughter got a good education so she could take care of herself and put her talents to use in service to others.

That is exactly what happened to this daughter of a father who toiled 40 years at the Harodite Industries factory in Taunton and a mother who worked at Taunton State Hospital and the Paul Dever School.

After graduating from Bristol-Plymouth Vocational Technical School and pursuing training as a chef (she worked for years at Benjamin’s Restaurant), Estele’s grandfather suffered a stroke. She witnessed how his physical therapist cared for him, an experience that inspired her to pursue and earn her degree in physical therapy.

Since then, Estele has used her education and skills as a therapist, exercise physiologist, health care consultant and transitional care manager. These are experiences that have given her a clear understanding of the challenges that families are facing across her community, and informed her service as community volunteer, City Councilor, and Bristol-Plymouth School Committee member.

She then earned her real estate and broker’s licenses and started her own small business. Always with an instinct to serve, she launched a first-time homebuyers initiative and has since helped hundreds of young couples achieve their dream in Taunton and surrounding towns.

All of these professional experiences led her to pursue public service. She has been elected to the Taunton City Council five times, the Bristol-Plymouth School Committee twice, and the Zoning Board of Appeals. In these positions, she has focused on bringing more transparency to government. This can be seen in her recent demands that City Hall explain sharp hikes  in residential tax bills, opposition to the sale of valuable city-owned open space for development near neighborhoods, opposition to the Aries gasification plant, and demand for a full impact analysis of a proposed 400-unit apartment complex in the Whittenton area.

Her volunteer work has included being among the founders of the non-profit District Center for the Arts, which brought music and art to downtown Taunton; and prior service as co-chair of the Community Crisis Intervention Team, which works to improve responses to incidents involving people who are mentally ill, developmentally disabled or experience trauma.

Outside her work and service activity, Estele is an avid long-distance cyclist who has ridden in multiple Pan-Mass Challenges to raise money for cancer research. She is the mother of two children.