I'm Shaffwan Ahmed I was born January 12th, 1989 in Detroit, Michigan. I'm a community organizer and activist. My family immigrated here from Bangladesh. I am considered a first generation immigrant. My identity didn't really become a thing until I was a bit older. When I'd say September 11th happened. But prior to that, it was just, I'm another kid on the block. I'm another kid in the neighborhood. Whether you're Black, White, Latino, Bangladeshi, Arab. 

One of my closest friends, he's since passed away a few years ago, his name was Mahmud. We challenge each other intellectually and athletically a lot. We saw each other practically every day because we went to the same school... so our families, we carpooled together. I still consider them family, but yeah, he passed away in a pretty bad car accident a couple of years ago. But one of the last things he said was, you know, he messaged me on Facebook... “I see a lot of the cool work you’re doing in the community. I can't wait to come back to Michigan and, you know, do this again...” and he told his mom the same thing, like, “I want my youngest sister to have the childhood we had growing up...” and that was what we kind of kept in mind. And I think that's what draws us in, that sense of community that was lost because of the traumatic experience from the recession. It's not a glorious job. I feel like I'm the janitor of the community, like no one wants to do this stuff, but I know we need to get it done. So I step up to the plate and do it. 

For the future of Detroit... I'm hoping we start to resolve some of these issues that are holding us back as a city and as a region. You don't go into this kind of work to become famous or anything like that. There's easier ways to become famous, more lucrative, too. But it's just this is an issue, my friend or my neighbor or this person that I don't even know is facing. How do we solve it? What system helped create this? Why are there no solutions for this? So that's how I look at it. I think we need to, you know, work to do that. And I mean, as far as legacy goes, I hope I've affected some positive change wherever I went. That's the only legacy I hope to leave behind.