Shining Light Awards: From Assembly Line to Lansing, Ismael Ahmed is a Fighter For the Voiceless
Ismael Ahmed was raised in Dearborn among blue-collar immigrants in the shadow of the Ford Rouge complex, an icon of metro Detroit’s manufacturing might.
Coming of age in the 1960s and ’70s, his first regular jobs were on the assembly line at Ford and Chrysler, where he became an aggressive advocate for workers and minorities. The anti-war and civil rights movements inspired Ahmed as he sought to organize Arab-American workers who some thought were being exploited.
Today, Ahmed can look back on decades of service on behalf of labor, immigrants, children, cultural understanding and building bridges across the community. He is this year’s winner of the Neal Shine Award for Exemplary Regional Leadership, sponsored by the Free Press and Metropolitan Affairs Coalition.
Ahmed, 65, has always looked for challenges. He’s now associate provost for metropolitan impact at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Before that, he accepted former Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s call to head Michigan’s massive Department of Human Services and spent three years in that position.
And Ahmed’s lasting legacy is his role in building one of Michigan’s most impactful service organizations — the Dearborn-based Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS). He was executive director of ACCESS for almost 25 years.
He’s a board member and one of the early supporters of Reading Works, dedicated to boosting adult literacy in the community. He’s also been a force in the region’s cultural scene — organizing concerts, promoting music of the world through festivals including the Concert of Colors and hosting an eclectic music show on WDET-FM (101.9) called “This Island Earth.”
Helping everyday people
Ahmed was inspired to widen his horizons and be involved in the community early on. His grandmother was a pioneering Muslim-American feminist. All through his career, he said, he’s been driven by a belief that real change starts from the ground up.
“If I was to be called anything, it would be a community organizer, sometimes a troublemaker,” Ahmed said. “I still believe that everything is about regular, everyday people. I believe that while there are some heroes, the real heroes are people who work every day.”
Born in Brooklyn to a Lebanese-American mother and Egyptian immigrant father, Ahmed moved to Dearborn’s south-end neighborhood when he was 6. His Yemeni-American stepfather, one of many Arab Americans who flocked to Dearborn for solid-paying jobs, worked at the Ford Rouge plant. After graduating from Fordson High School, Ahmed saw the world — and global poverty — while working as a deckhand on freighters.
He returned home determined to help his own community. He graduated from Henry Ford Community College and then U-M Dearborn.
In 1971, he helped found ACCESS — a grassroots effort at first, in a storefront staffed by volunteers. Ahmed helped build it into a powerhouse with a $17-million annual budget, affiliates in 12 states and a staff of 300. ACCESS works to assist immigrants and people in need with health, education, arts and employment — serving 900,000 people of all backgrounds.
ACCESS also launched other Arab-American national organizations, including the National Network for Arab American Communities. In 2005, it created the Arab American National Museum, the first major museum dedicated to Arab-American history and culture.
“He has never lost focus on putting the interest of the disadvantaged and the poor before anything else,” said Hassan Jaber, current executive director of ACCESS.
State government work
In 2007, Ahmed got a call from Granholm, asking him to head the human services department and its $7-billion budget. He led several reforms that improved access for low-income residents.
“Inside state government, he was a fighter for those who had no megaphone and no lobbyists,” Granholm said. “In addition to making sure that vulnerable children were safe, he insisted that we focus on people who were unseen — the poor, the homeless, the chronically unemployed. He has a heart as big as a barn and a passion for people.”
Now at his alma mater, Ahmed works on connecting the university to the region, with more than 3,000 students volunteering and doing research across metro Detroit.
“Ismael is the kind of leader for whom I have the greatest admiration,” said U-M Dearborn Chancellor Dan Little, “a person who wants to work collaboratively to bring about great community benefits — without concern for his own ego.”
Niraj Warikoo
Detroit Free Press