Harvard Teaching Fellow · Organizer · Researcher · Author · Miltonian
Meet Zainab Azim
“What are you gonna do about it? What are we going to do about it?”
Ms. Pauline asked Zainab that question on a Montessori playground right here in Milton, after listening to a student complain about problems that felt too big to fix. She has spent her life trying to answer it ever since.
Milton is where Zainab grew up and was raised by her grandmother - a fellow educator - in a town where neighbours dropped pulao and pineapple cake at the door because it takes a village. She first learned the power of organizing at her Montessori school, and the power of a team on Milton United's soccer pitch - where her coach taught her that the best players don't just see where the ball is now. They see where it's going and work with their team to get it there. In 2022, the town named her Milton Citizen of the Year - and later its youngest-ever Official Bellringer.
Like so many of us, she spent much of her time at the GO station - watching the town empty every morning, believing that to change anything you had to leave. That the power to change the world lived somewhere else. So she went looking for it. In academia, as a researcher in developmental neuroscience. In government, working in the offices of Canada's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, where federal budgets are shaped. In diplomacy, as the youngest ambassador and mentor in the United Nations Space4Women program. In philanthropy, with nonprofits including the Urban Alliance on Race Relations and the National Education Policy Centre. At Harvard, where she earned her Master of Education and now teaches policy analysis, economics, and the practice of organizing people-powered movements as a Teaching Fellow. And most recently in New York, organizing on the Zohran Mamdani mayoral campaign - where she watched everyday people win a city of eight million, one door and neighbour at a time.
What she learned?
“Power is not in some person, position or some place. Power is in our people. And hope is at home.”
Instead of looking for the power to change the world out there, she came home to invest in the power of the people in this town to create change starting at home. With a deep belief that Milton is full of hardworking, talented, brilliant people who deserve to be seen, she started Meet Milton, a storytelling project spotlighting the local community leaders and businesses in town. Committed to building people's collective capacity to lead and create change, she founded Learn to Lead - a registered Canadian NGO offering free leadership workshops rooted in Harvard pedagogy and lessons from the field, from public narrative and negotiation to small business and policy clinics - starting in Milton to give forward. She supports Milton Transitional Housing in the Coldest Night of the Year and has volunteered with the Milton District Hospital Foundation.
She is a published researcher and the author of three books on education, with a fourth on the way from her team at the Harvard Kennedy School - on people-based politics and the Mamdani campaign.
We are not running to be something. We are running to do something - with you.
“I gave up on politics and politicians a long time ago. But never on people and the beautiful things they can do when they come together.”
The Story of the Campaign
Not to be something. To do something.
This campaign launched on May 3, 2026 - not with a speech and a stage, but with 100 volunteers knocking on doors across Milton, six months before the election. Because hope is not something we wait for. It is something we build.
Before a single policy was written, we sat in living rooms across this town with hundreds of Miltonians. We listened to families who have been here for generations and families who arrived this spring. And in every language, we kept hearing the same thing:
We love this town. And we want to spend more time in the town that we love, with the people that we love - instead of losing time. Time on the 401. Time waiting for a bus that doesn't come. Time in the school pickup line. Time our elders spend in isolation.
Time is the one thing we can't make back. So our platform is literally about time - giving it back for what matters most. Time is money. Time is affordability.
We are not asking for your vote alone. We are asking for your voice, your values, your vision. And winning doesn't mean election day. Winning is measured in how many new community leaders this campaign develops - people who keep doing the work long after October 26. Because winning means delivering.
In MiltonMeet Milton · Learn to Lead · Milton Transitional Housing (Coldest Night of the Year) · Milton District Hospital Foundation · Milton Citizen of the Year 2022 · Family contribution to the Milton Hospital and Arts Centre Development
Awards and Fellowships
- Oval Office Fellowship, HKS Women in Public Policy ProgramCambridge, MA, 2025
- Citizen of the Year, Town of MiltonMilton, ON, 2022
- Rising Star Award, Northern Lights Aero FoundationToronto, ON, 2022
Speaking
- American Education Research AssociationDenver, CO, April 2025
- Harvard Global Education ConferenceCambridge, MA, January 2025
- Harvard AI & Education Conference: Stories from the Global South
- Cambridge University: AI & Education Research Conference
- Perimeter Institute Emmy Noether National ForumWaterloo, ON, 2023
- UNOOSA Space4Women Expert Education Working GroupMontreal, QC & Daejeon, South Korea, 2022-2023
- Space Women Space Girls ExhibitionUnited Nations; European Union, 2021-2022
- UNICEF International Day of Women in ScienceDubai, UAE, 2022