About Fatima Iqbal-Zubair

Fatima Iqbal-Zubair has spent her career advocating and expanding opportunities for working families. As an immigrant, educator, and mother to a son with special needs, Fatima understands first-hand the hardships her neighbors face.

She’s running for State Assembly to provide a bold vision that protects and uplifts our communities by tackling the high cost of living, building affordable housing, and responding to our infrastructure needs.

Fatima serves as legislative affairs manager and advocate for a nonprofit in Sacramento that focuses on advancing equitable environmental and democracy priorities through our state legislature. She co-chairs an alliance that has brought together both labor and environmental groups for the past year, working closely with labor to support high road and high quality jobs, while also passing transformative climate policy.

Fatima has a knack for building coalitions and bringing people together to effect change and make progress on key issues for marginalized communities. She is the chair of the California Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus, leading the largest state Democratic caucus in the nation. In this role, she has had many achievements, such as co-writing the state's reparations resolution and bringing together delegates of all faiths together to pass a ceasefire resolution.

She leads a youth nonprofit STEAM leader at TeraWatts Initiative, which was founded to ensure equity in education for first-generation black and brown students to have access to STEAM careers. The nonprofit also runs a free annual STEAM summer camp for young children each summer and has formed numerous collaborations with local organizations and community gardens.

Living in South Los Angeles, Fatima brings with her lived experiences as a former California Teachers Association member and community organizer. Her activism stems from her work as a high school science teacher in Watts at a school that has dealt with the effects of polluted water and land. She became involved in numerous local and statewide coalitions to help build healthier and more livable communities for our youth to thrive in. 

Fatima's leadership in the legislature will focus on ensuring California codifies our basic rights by tackling the important issues that matter most to our communities: rebuilding our infrastructure, creating good paying jobs, solving environmental issues equitably while ensuring California leads on renewable energy, investing in affordable housing, protecting and uplifting black and brown communities and women, improving our public education system so that it's community-centered and high quality, assuring that health care is a human right, and creating a criminal justice system that focuses on uplifting systems of care and focuses on crime prevention.