From Queens,
Rana
Abdelhamid
Rana Abdelhamid is an author, organizer, and mother from Queens with 18 years of grassroots experience. She is the daughter of Egyptian immigrants, whose work lives at the intersection of safety, storytelling, and collective power. A Black belt in karate and graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School with a Master in Public Policy, she founded Malikah to build community-rooted safety infrastructure for Muslim women, immigrant and SWANA communities, and working-class New Yorkers, combining self-defense training, mutual aid, and policy advocacy to transform how we think about safety and belonging. Through her organizing, she has helped advance legislation strengthening protections for vulnerable communities while building tangible alternatives to gender and hate violence on the ground. Her book, Get Home Safe, reimagines self-defense not just as physical technique, but as a framework for unlearning harm, reclaiming power, and building collective safety.
Community organizing
Her organizing is deeply place-based and community-rooted, grounded in the blocks of Astoria where she first learned both fear and resilience and where she continues to build alternatives to violence, abandonment, and invisibility. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Malikah, a grassroots organization with a community storefront in Astoria that provides trauma-informed self-defense, healing justice, bystander intervention, and community organizing to communities most impacted by violence and oppression. Over the past fourteen years, Rana has led Malikah to train more than 20,000 women and youth across 35+ cities, empowering survivors, immigrant women, youth, and elders with the tools to reclaim their safety and agency.
She is the founder of the Astoria Halal Fest and Ramadan Night Market, which annually brings together over 10,000 people and supports more than 100 small, immigrant-owned vendors, turning streets in her Astoria community into spaces of joy, connection, and economic empowerment during the holy month.
Culture and Art
Rana is also a cultural strategist, USC Civic Media Fellow, and storyteller whose work preserves and amplifies the histories of communities too often erased. She co-curated the “Malikah” exhibition at MoMA PS1, the first of its kind to center the oral and visual histories of working-class North African women in Queens. She is the creator and host of Hijabis of New York, a viral digital storytelling project highlighting the lived experiences of Muslim women across the five boroughs. She curated a Little Egypt walking tour that traces the political, cultural, and immigrant histories of Astoria’s SWANA community, and has founded large-scale public events that bring thousands of New Yorkers together each year, including the Ramadan Night Market, the Muslim Women’s Art Gallery, and Astoria Halal Fest. She has also directed two public murals in Queens, using art as a tool for cultural memory and collective pride. In addition, she founded the National Muslim Women’s Summit, an annual gathering convening hundreds of Muslim women from across the country for training, healing, and sisterhood. Rana also worked at Google for eight years as a marketing lead focused on social impact within Google.org, Google Cloud and Women Techmakers.
Politics and leadership
As a leading advocate for Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) data equity, Rana founded and led the New York MENA Coalition, bringing together a multiracial alliance of community organizations and policy experts. Through strategic organizing and community storytelling, she successfully introduced and helped pass New York State’s first ever MENA data disaggregation bill, ensuring that MENA communities are finally recognized and resourced in education, healthcare, and public systems.
In 2022, she ran for U.S. Congress in New York’s 12th Congressional District, endorsed by Justice Democrats. Her visionary, people-powered campaign raised nearly $1 million without corporate PACs, mobilized thousands of volunteers, and earned endorsements from over three dozen elected officials and organizations.
Rana served for six years as one of the youngest-ever board members of Amnesty International USA and currently sits on the Council of NalaFEM, a pan-African feminist collective working to end gender-based violence across the African continent and diaspora communities. She is a Truman Scholar and holds a Master of Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School. Her thought leadership has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vogue, NPR, Al Jazeera, and Democracy Now!, among others. From block corners to gallery walls, mutual aid lines to congressional campaigns, Rana Abdelhamid is building a future where healing is political, safety is collective, and no one is left behind.
Her Book
Rana’s book, Get Home Safe (Algonquin, 2026), is a self-defense guide to reclaiming safety and power in an unsafe world. Blending memoir, survivor stories, organizing lessons, and trauma-informed practice, the book challenges traditional ideas of self-defense and offers a new, community-rooted vision of safety rooted in healing, dignity, and justice. She is a frequent speaker and healing facilitator, known for holding intergenerational spaces of care and transformation, especially for racially minoritized, immigrant, and system-impacted people. She regularly organizes healing-centered workshops across university campuses, mosques, shelters, and community centers. Buy the book to support.
Her impact have been recognized widely, including:
Echoing Green Fellow (2024)
New York State Proclamation for Women’s History Month (2025)
New York State Proclamation for advocacy on the MENA Bill (2024)
Harry S. Truman Scholarship (2014) for a policy proposal to implement domestic violence education in NYC public schools
UNA-USA Leo Nevas Human Rights Youth Award, presented by the United Nations Association of the USA
Running Start Rising Political Star Award, recognizing civic leadership among young women
L’Oréal Paris Women of Worth Finalist, honored for her self-defense work and resilience in the face of online harassment
