Shahid has been building social movements and speaking truth to power for two decades. 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.

An immigrant from the U.K. whose family lost a home to foreclosure in his teens, Shahid struggled to pay for his education, spending a decade going to college mostly at night while working full-time to earn his BA, summa cum laude, from Loyola University Chicago in 2000. His time in Chicago offered opportunities to observe police corruption, political corruption, and the corruption of capital markets by the precursors of the 2008 financial crisis.

Shahid was among our country’s first advocates for marriage equality for LGBTQ couples. He organized and served on the legal team that represented Jason West, the Mayor of New Paltz, NY starting in 2004.

Since 2008, he has also been a leader in the movement to end warrantless government surveillance, From 2015-2019, Shahid built a national grassroots network for the Electronic Frontier Foundation as the organization’s Director of Grassroots Advocacy, and worked across the U.S. to enable our country’s first local restrictions on the domestic surveillance in cities including San Francisco. He previously served as the Executive Director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee from 2009-2015 after launching the program at Muslim Advocates to challenge racial and religious profiling in 2008.

In addition to LGBTQ rights, privacy, and the right to encryption, Shahid’s work as a public interest advocate 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.

Shahid's wide-ranging work finds inspiration in his commitments to international human rights, intersectional feminism, and communities marginalized by the continuing reflections of colonialism. His passions have long aligned around a common purpose: building the movement to put people before profit and communities before corporations.

The rarest thing in an elected official is the ability to put ego aside, and focus on the real work of making this country better. It's easy to get caught up in the pageantry and the celebrity of office, or to spend so much time making connections and winning favors that the term runs out before the policy issues even make it to the floor. Then those abandoned issues become the refrain for the next campaign cycle. This usually comes hand in hand with an inability to move beyond what is popular in the moment. To me the only thing that matters is the number of bills I can cosponsor, and vote through on the floor. And every media appearance has to be geared toward highlighting that policy agenda, rather than taking the bait and falling into the latest passing news cycle. Look for the helpers. Look for the people who don't have time to make up spin or hype their brand. Look for those who center their work, and give the same answer to everyone, everywhere. It's not about me; it's about us—All of US!