From an early age, Shagoofa Khan felt propelled to make her community a better place. Growing up in Antioch – a small city one hour north-east of San Francisco, where the industrial landscape of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta meets the rolling pastures of Contra Costa county – the now 22-year-old activist witnessed the effects of racial and socioeconomic inequality on a daily basis.
At 15, after seeing peers succumb to gang violence, she trained and worked as a teen conflict manager. Once she graduated from high school, Khan – who is the child of immigrants from Pakistan and Afghanistan – ran for local office as a school board trustee, and later became a student senator at Los Medanos Community College.
