Shahid Buttar For Change- California CD12 - U.S. Congress

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Shahid has been building social movements and speaking truth to power for more than a decade. Since graduating from Stanford Law School in 2003, he has worked in both San Francisco and Washington as a legal advocate, a non-profit leader, a grassroots organizer, and a poet & musician. His passions have long aligned around a common purpose: building the movement to place human rights and human needs like peace and sustainability before corporate profits.

An early advocate for marriage equality for same-sex couples and a prolific organizer in the movement to end warrantless government surveillance, Shahid most recently built a national grassroots network for the Electronic Frontier Foundation as the organization’s Director of Grassroots Advocacy.

In addition to LGBTQ rights, privacy, and the right to encryption, Shahid’s work has also advanced immigrant rights, campaign finance reform, government transparency, international human rights, and police accountability. His writing has explored issues from the right-wing attack on reproductive freedom to the erosion of voting rights, and from effective counter-terrorism strategies to examples of counter-cultural activism promoting progressive politics at the intersection of art and organizing.

An immigrant of Pakistani descent from the United Kingdom and the youngest of four children, Shahid grew up in the midwest and first came to the Bay Area in 2000 to study law at Stanford.

While a student at Stanford Law School, he served as Executive Editor of the Stanford Environmental Law Journal and professor Lawrence Lessig’s teaching assistant for Constitutional Law. He also spear-headed a campaign to promote sustainable building practices by the university, a day of action to shut down a Lockheed Martin facility, and a student strike against the war in Iraq.

After growing immersed in the movement to end the war, Shahid moved to Washington to work for Heller Ehrman LLP, a San Francisco-based law firm that later collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis. His work there included litigation championing the right to marry the partner of one’s choice—nearly 10 years before the Democratic establishment finally embraced marriage equality—and an appeal defending bipartisan campaign finance reform from being undermined by the Federal Election Commission.

Through his work building movements for peace, immigrant rights, black lives, and the Occupy movement, Shahid dedicated his career to public service long before he sought public office.

As a national non-profit leader, he built a national progressive legal network at the American Constitution Society while in Washington to help correct the conservative bias increasingly pervading the federal courts.

He later founded a program at Muslim Advocates here in San Francisco to challenge racial & religious profiling by federal agencies such as the FBI, whose abuses of constitutional rights to dissent span nearly a century.

For six years, he led the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (now known as Defending Rights and Dissent) as its Executive Director. The organization was founded in response to the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act to help everyday Americans in hundreds of communities across the country fight at the local level for their constitutional rights.

Since joining the SF-based Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2015, Shahid envisioned and launched a national grassroots network, represented the organization in the media and at public events from coast-to-coast, and frequently wrote for public audiences to explain the implications of EFF’s commitment to digital rights for policy issues from mass surveillance and encryption to net neutrality and restrictions on police.

Outside of his work as an advocate and organizer, Shahid performs as a DJ, MC, and poet. He also organizes artists, and has co-founded several collectives of politicized performance artists on both costs.

In 2002, while studying law at Stanford, Shahid co-founded the Stanford Spoken Word Collective, which continues to recruit & train poets in the Collective’s 18th year.

Before passing the California bar exam in 2003, Shahid met three three other poets at an open mic in SoMa hosted by the legendary Diamond Dave. Together, they founded the outdoor poetry convergence that has graced the corner of 16th & Mission every Thursday night for the past 15 years.

A few months later, he founded the DC Guerrilla Poetry Insurgency in Washington.

In between, he participated in Burning Man for the first time, before returning many times to perform documentary poems, rock revolutionary rhymes, and share socially conscious music for camps from Pink Mammoth and Heart Phoenix to Opulent Chill and TransFOAMation, while helping build art projects from the Solarium and the Heart Phoenix to the Sonic Runway.

In the wake of Trump’s election, Shahid combined his passions for justice and music by founding Movement, a series of quarterly parties in San Francisco supporting local non-profits that serve immigrant communities, such as Causa Justa / Just Cause and Asian Pacific Islanders Legal Outreach.

His writing for Huffington Post, Truthout, the Burning Man Journal, Tech Crunch, Project Censored, and academic legal journals addresses a wide range of issues, from foreign policy and counterterrorism to human rights and torture, from transparency and drone strikes to voting rights and tax law, from the crisis in executive power and corresponding threat to democracy to the bait-and-switch surrounding police body cameras.

In addition to his work as a public interest advocate, writer, and artist, Shahid also serves on the Boards of Directors of the Center for Media Justice, Defending Rights and Dissent, and the Fund for Constitutional Government.

Shahid wields over a decade of experience advocating for your rights, building organizations, and challenging executive abuses—even without a seat in Congress. He’s tired of watching Washington serve corporate and military interests and ignore the needs of working Americans like you.

It’s time for San Francisco to get a new generation representation in the nation’s capital. That’s why Shahid is running to represent our city in Congress!

Thank you for supporting our 2020 campaign to represent California's 12th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives!

Having emerged from the 2018 primary as the leading challenger from the left to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, we're poised to join her in the November 2020 primary and offer San Francisco an alternative voice in Congress.

Want to support the inspiring voices of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ro Khanna, and others in Congress working to defend working families and future generations? So do we!

With your support, we're poised to reclaim San Francisco's seat in Congress in 2020 on behalf of working families and future generations.

A Progressive Candidates Campaign