Addressing a crowd of community leaders and activists in Roxbury’s Nubian Square, Gov. Maura Healey asked for their help in fixing the MBTA by spreading the word about job openings.

At an event put together by the political action coalition known as Communities of Color (COC), Healey laid out some of the challenges facing the MBTA and praised the incoming general manager, Phillip Eng of New York’s Long Island Railroad.

“He’s going to be great. He’s an engineer, he’s on the job, he’s been hands-on,” Healey told a crowd at Hibernian Hall that included political activists and elected officials such as Mayor Michelle Wu and Auditor Diana DiZoglio. She appeared on stage with Joseph Feaster, an attorney and chair of the city of Boston’s task force on reparations.

Eng will build out a leadership team, Healey said, and “their charge is to transform things, to fix things.”

The MBTA has suffered from “years and years, decades of, you know, at times questionable management and leadership, underinvestment, and you pay the price every single day, and we know that,” Healey told the crowd of about 500 leaders mostly from Dorchester, Mattapan, and Roxbury.

The T is facing a workforce shortage, and she asked attendees to encourage people to apply for the “great jobs” at the public transit agency.

“You can build a career here,” she said. “We also understand it’s tough to be a bus driver right now if you’re going to get yelled at every day. There are other things to do. So, we are going to try to create a culture so we bring people in, fill the 800 or 900 slots of shifters, of repairmen, of dispatchers, operators, drivers. And I ask for community help in this.”

Her administration is “not going to be able to get this done unless we get the workforce,” Healey said.

Healey added that she supports low fares and pilots for no fares, a nod to the Wu administration’s three fare-free bus lines that have run through Dorchester, Mattapan, and Roxbury.

The governor, who took office in January, also touched on housing, noting that she has proposed creating a new secretariat dedicated to increasing the number of homes in Massachusetts as the region faces a crisis driven by high demand and low supply.

The administration is committed to working with advocates and developers to create 200,000 new units of housing, Healey said.

“Rents are out of control, we know that,” she said. “And we know the specter of paying a downpayment on a home is way too out of reach for too many.”