Shakirah Simley is a seasoned organizer and community development strategist with over fifteen years of experience working on social justice and equity policy initiatives. Most recently, Ms. Simley served as a Legislative Aide to Supervisor Vallie Brown, representing District 5 of the City and County of San Francisco, where she managed the Supervisor’s policy and legislative priorities regarding equity, gender, community development, housing, and homelessness, and assisted in passing over 30 pieces of legislation. She also served as Supervisor Brown’s lead for the City Budget process, successfully advocating for increased funds for affordable housing production, a local Working Families Earned Income Tax Credit, and universal access to legal aid for low-income communities. Prior to working in City Hall, Ms. Simley was the Acting Executive Director and Community Programs Manager of the Southeast Community Facility and the SECF Commission in the Bayview Hunters Point for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, where she directed all Center programming, staff, facilities, budget, and community engagement activities. She also served as lead and co-facilitator in the planning, development, and community outreach for the building of a new Southeast Community Facility at 1550 Evans. Ms. Simley was a 2017 recipient of the Exchange Fellowship with Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture and served as the Community Programs Director for Bi-Rite, an independently-owned family of sustainable food businesses in San Francisco. For over five years, Ms. Simley led community outreach and strategy, youth development, and philanthropy programs for Bi-Rite's five businesses, where she directed $1.3 million dollars’ worth of support towards over 2,500 organizations within the San Francisco Bay Area, prioritizing initiatives that support a good, clean, and just food system. 

Ms. Simley has always uplifted social justice issues, particularly for people of color. She has served as a technical assistance provider to Funders' Collaborative for Youth Organizing; working with young people in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans to change their school food systems. Ms. Simley worked with community-based organizations and indigenous groups to organize for effective, culturally competent policy initiatives that addressed social determinants of health through her work with the Prevention Institute, and Robert Wood Johnson-funded national initiative, Communities Creating Healthier Environments (CCHE). Ms. Simley served as one of the first Human Rights Fellows for the City of New York, where she co-developed an employment rights ESOL curriculum for immigrant workers and spearheaded the development of a NYC Civil Rights Oral History Documentation Project. 

Ms. Simley was a U.S. Fulbright scholar to Italy for Anthropological study, where she received her master’s degree, cum laude. She received her undergraduate degree in Cultural Anthropology and Urban Studies with honors from the University of Pennsylvania, where she successfully advocated for the inclusion of a United States cross-cultural analysis requirement to the College of Arts and Sciences curriculum. As a trained organizer via the Midwest Academy, she successfully led a living wage and unionization campaign for on-campus security guards at Penn and Temple, as the co-founder of Penn Student Labor Action Project, and partner with Philadelphia Jobs with Justice. Through her professional and community building pursuits, Ms. Simley has continued to leverage her extensive community organizing, public speaking, workshop design, and facilitation skills. In 2016, she co-founded an organizing collaborative of people of color working in good food, called Nourish|Resist. Nourish|Resist provided over 225 youth and local community members capacity-building activities and direct action education over delicious, lovingly-made meals, including an #UnPresidentedMeal in a public high school cafeteria, and #LoveLetterstoLegislators at a community cooking school to support SB54, California’s sanctuary law. 

The daughter of a social worker and granddaughter of a Black Panther, Ms. Simley was born in the South Bronx and raised in Harlem, New York. She is the oldest of 5 kids, who always keep her grounded and honest. Shakirah has lived in San Francisco for over 12 years, working to change access and opportunity for low-income communities and generations of young people to come.