Donate to Ali for Jersey City

Mussab Ali is the former Jersey City Board of Education President, education nonprofit founder, and cancer survivor running for mayor of Jersey City. Mussab is a researcher at Rutgers Law School focused on housing inequality. 

Mussab’s parents came to Jersey City 25 years ago in pursuit of a better education for their children. They both got good-paying union jobs - his mom, an educator, and his dad, a postal worker, that allowed them to give their family a good middle-class life. 

In 2017, Mussab ran for Jersey City Board of Education and made history as the youngest elected official in Jersey City history, at just 20 years old, and the youngest Muslim elected in the country at the time. Later elected BOE president by his peers, Mussab worked to raise teachers’ salaries to $61,000 per year, abolish student lunch debt, and raise the minimum wage to $17 per hour. In 2018, Mussab co-founded the Ali Leadership Institute to train the next generation of activists, organizers, and grassroots leaders.

Mussab received his B.A. from Rutgers University-Newark, where he was a Truman scholar, his master's from Tsinghua University as a Schwarzman Scholar, and his J.D. from Harvard Law School. At Harvard, he served as the student body’s co-president and was a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow.

Mussab is a survivor of Stage 4 Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and recently ran his first marathon.