Ashik Siddique 🪴 At-Large 🪴 he/him

Ashik was elected to the National Political Committee of DSA in 2021, and currently serves on the Steering Committee as Secretary/Treasurer. In the past term he has also served as cochair of the Budget & Finance Committee and chair of the Personnel Committee, as well as involved in the Multiracial Organizing Committee, Communications Committee, and Development Committee.

Ashik was born and raised in Brooklyn, NYC, in a Bangladeshi immigrant family. He was politicized as a Muslim teenager after 9/11, when family members were surveilled and profiled by police, and then through Occupy Wall Street in 2011, while working at a veterans hospital in the Bronx with combat veterans of Iraq & Afghanistan with PTSD. He got involved in climate organizing, and joined DSA in early 2017 as he came to understand how nonprofit-led activism has been unable to meet the scale of the ecological crisis by challenging its root cause — capitalism — and that our best hope for collective survival is a mass socialist organization that is deeply intertwined with a resurgent labor movement in the U.S.

Before being elected to the NPC, he served on the Metro DC chapter’s Steering Committee from 2018-2019, helped run a slate of DSA candidates for DC’s hyperlocal Advisory Neighborhood Commissions in 2018, and helped set up what became We Power DC, a campaign for energy democracy in the nation’s capital. At the national level, Ashik helped build up the Ecosocialist Working Group as a member of its Steering Committee, creating national organizing infrastructure to support chapter work around the Green New Deal campaign, and coordinating with other national priorities, including serving on the DSA for Bernie steering committee during the 2020 primary, and organizing DSA’s campaign to pass the PRO Act to expand labor rights in 2021.

For work, Ashik is a research analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies, analyzing militarized spending in the US federal budget — and all the nice things that would be possible if we simply defund the Pentagon. He and coworkers organized a union with the support and solidarity of DSA labor organizers, and are proud members of the Washington-Baltimore News Guild.