Seema Ahmad, a community organizer, Harvard trained public policy analyst and lawyer, filed this week to run in the 7th House District, currently represented by Representative Tonya Myers Phillips.
The district comprises of the cities of Hamtramck, Highland Park, and surrounding Detroit. Particularly, Hamtramck is the most diverse city in Michigan with people from Bangladesh, Yemen, Poland, and Ukrain.
Ahmad has been engaged in political and community activity in Metro Detroit since 2008. Prior to that, she worked for local governments as a turnaround consultant and a bureaucrat. She is the author of Bridge Over Troubled Waters, a memoir of her father’s founding work to create North South University in Bangladesh, a university at which she was recently a board of trustee for two years.
Starting with 2008, she campaigned in Detroit and Hamtramck across 30 precincts, registering voters and making thousands of voter contacts during Barack Obama’s first campaign. After the campaign, Ahmad joined the Alliance for Immigration Reform as the Oakland County district director.
Ahmad founded the non-profit Center for Education Development (CED) to assist her family in building a university in Bangladesh called the Presidency University. She resigned from the Board in 2004, but then worked with the World Computer Exchange to send hundreds of computers to a dozen non-profits in 2001-02. The organization was renamed PARIS, for Political Activism, Relief and Institutional Startups and now supports orphaned and abandoned children with the intention of stopping child labor.
The married mother of three adult children has a public policy degree from Harvard University. She is also a lawyer and received her Bar at Law and LLM degree from the City Law School at City St. George’s University of London, joining the alma mater of Gandhi, Nehru, Thatcher and Blair.
