Dear John,

We will all reflect on 2020 as a challenging year, to say the least.

Between the pandemic, the resulting economic collapse, continuing wildfires, and an ongoing crisis in our democracy, it certainly presented many reasons for frustration—not to mention the profound grief emanating from the loss of over 350,000 Americans from a disease that our government has seemed hell-bent on incubating.

We hope that 2021 ultimately offers better memories. But to make that happen it will take hard work on the ground in communities across our country.

That’s why I’d like to share with you three non-profit organizations that I support, and invite you to help support—and expand—their work.

As our federal government has more or less abandoned the needs of people confronting the mounting crisis, we’ve watched a food security crisis erupt across the United States. When I most recently volunteered with the SF-Marin Food Bank this spring, the line to pick up food stretched down the block and included San Franciscans from all walks of life.

Today, those bread lines are stretching down the highway in cities across the country. The resources available to struggling families are not meeting the needs—or filling empty stomachs. That’s why it is critically important to support local food banks, and why I’m eager to invite you to join me and contribute to the SF-Marin Food Bank.

Also working at the intersection of not only food security, but also urban agriculture, and the cultivation of opportunities for marginalized communities, is Urban Tilth. Based in Richmond, CA, the organization provides free fresh food to families across the East Bay, as well as learning opportunities for young people from communities traditionally excluded from the farm-to-table movement.

I support Urban Tilth because the organization is not only responding to the food security crisis, but also working every day in our region’s most marginalized community to actively build racial justice and expand opportunity. Urban Tilth is also an especially small organization, meaning that your support could make an especially big impact.

Long before running for Congress, I led a grassroots non-profit based on the east coast that was founded to politicize and repudiate mass surveillance under the Patriot Act. Before leaving the organization (then known as the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, or BORDC) to join the staff of Electronic Frontier Foundation, we orchestrated a merger between BORDC and Defending Dissent, another group that had worked to defend grassroots dissent for several decades, ever since the red scare led by Senator Eugene McCarthy.

Together, the combined organization is Defending Rights and Dissent. I’m proud to serve on the Board of Directors, and excited by the organization’s work in this moment in history. Restrictions on dissent have undermined our democracy in relative obscurity for many years, but many Americans finally came to recognize them after this summer’s brutal DHS crackdowns in cities across the country including Portland, OR and Kenosha, WI.

Dissent is the lifeblood of our democracy. It is a transpartisan value, one that should unite all Americans. That’s why I’m eager to invite your support for the policy advocacy, issue analysis, and community organizing enabled by my colleagues at Defending Rights and Dissent.

These groups can’t fix the future alone. Efforts from community mutual aid efforts to changing the voices making policy in Washington are all critical to bringing the change that we all seek. But the work of each of these groups lays a crucial part of the foundation required for the broader struggle to which we all remain committed.

Thank you for standing with me—and these important non-profit organizations!

Wishing you a healthy new year,

Shahid