On January 1, 2026, Zohran Mamdani—a socialist, a Muslim, and an immigrant—took office as the elected Mayor of New York City, home to the largest number of billionaires in the world. And within 8 days announced a plan to fulfill one of his major campaign promises—universal childcare—demonstrating that change does not have to be slow.
Mamdani, whose parents both have roots from India, carried all the wrong identity markers, a campaign agenda that directly threatened billionaires in the city of billionaires, and faced open hostility from President Trump. To top it all off, he never minced words in expressing his support for Palestinian rights and opposing the genocide committed by Israel, in a city that has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.
For the 34-year-old former Assemblyman (the equivalent of an MLA)—who was virtually unknown a year ago—to win over the city, it would take much more than a creative Instagram page.
Sonya Soni, a US-born Indian American who spent much of her summer holidays with family in Delhi and Punjab, was one of the 1,04,000 volunteers for the ‘Zohran 4 NYC’ campaign. Most of 2025, Sonya spent her time after work walking the streets of New York City, climbing endless flights of stairs in old, elevator-less apartment buildings, knocking on doors, and organising ‘Chai and Chats’ at street corners. Sonya and ordinary New Yorkers with no experience in formal politics were invited to do a simple, yet uncomfortable act—speak with their neighbours about the future of their city.
While 26 US billionaires, including those associated with Airbnb, Estée Lauder, and Netflix, spent over $40 million funding opposition campaigns and media outlets pushing anti-Mamdani messaging, volunteers like Sonya were knocking on doors, engaging New Yorkers in real conversations about who he was and what he stood for.
“For the first time, I truly felt a sense of belonging and longing for this city—strangers were being deeply curious about each other. And this was happening in the most capitalistic city in the world!” Sonya said about her canvassing experience.
When Sonya and others knocked on doors, they were not merely asking for votes. They engaged in conversations that lasted anywhere between 1 to 20 minutes, depending on the openness of those on the other side of the door. During these exchanges, Sonya would share why she was volunteering and what had called her to action, drawing from her lived experience as a New York City resident, and then invite the person at the door to share their own story—what mattered to them, why it mattered, and what a dignified, respected life looked like. These conversations created space to truly understand people’s concerns through their lived realities.
Together, the volunteers helped the campaign achieve a monumental goal: knocking on 3 million doors and making 4.4 million phone calls to have direct conversations with residents across a city with a population of 8.5 million.
The last time the United States saw a massive volunteer operation such as this was during the run-up to the 2008 presidential elections for the ‘Obama for America’ campaign.
Both Barack Obama and Zohran Mamdani’s campaigns were built on a practice called community organising, employing the framework developed by Marshall Ganz, Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and a US Civil Rights activist himself. Ganz served as an advisor to Mamdani and was the architect of the Obama campaign in 2008.
While today’s electoral campaigns draw power from professional staff, consultants, paid canvassers, and large donors, community organising inverts this model. It builds capacity by enabling local residents to take responsibility for organising their own neighbourhoods to elect a leader with whom they share values and vision.
“Democracy isn’t something you have—it’s something you do. It is a practice that can be learned, improved upon, adapted, and sustained—without which it will inevitably erode,” says
Marshall Ganz, emphasising the importance of engaging the common person in the democratic process of elections.
Mahatma Gandhi, whom Ganz refers to as a master organiser, successfully organised ordinary Indians into political and social actors. Be it through engaging people in spinning khadi, walking alongside him for the Dandi march or refusing to give up one’s agency by practising civil disobedience, Gandhi designed actions that anyone could repeat.
India is the world’s largest democracy, yet political activity remains within a circle of those affiliated with political parties. Mamdani’s campaign left no stone unturned in ensuring that people who have never engaged in politics were engaging locally. The campaign hosted a range of community events, including meet-ups for parents taking their children out to play, neighbourhood running clubs, mothers and teens canvasses, and art sessions to create DIY canvassing materials.
In December 2024, Tascha Van Auken, the campaign director for ‘Zohran 4 NYC’, began as a one-person field team, working out of her living room with an ambitious goal—to reach one million doors. From here, she built a small group of initial volunteers, who were quickly trained to lead incoming volunteers. Volunteer numbers grew from one to a hundred in a few weeks. While many were initially drawn in by the campaign’s goals, they kept returning also because of the relationships they were building with one another and with the campaign. This relational pull is at the core of all organising work.
When asked why she returned to volunteer week after week, Sanam, a mother of two who had never engaged in political activity before, shared, “Back in July 2025 I was first invited by a friend to organise a fundraiser… When I was there, I remember thinking, ‘Wow!’ People across faiths and economic levels were together. There was unspoken support and unconditional love that everyone had for each other. People wanted to help each other outside the campaign. This is the NYC I always wanted it to be.”
In contrast, opponent Andrew Cuomo’s campaign relied heavily on hourly-paid workers who largely limited their role to distributing leaflets, without engaging with residents.
As volunteer numbers grew, the ‘snowflake model’ from Ganz’s organising framework helped structure the expanding team. Volunteers were quickly trained to become team leads, and as the campaign scaled, higher leadership roles emerged. First-time volunteers soon became leads and coordinators, who ensured that every volunteer had a canvass lead to whom they stayed accountable.
The leadership team developed multiple strategies to sustain and rapidly scale the field operation. One notable example was the ‘ZetroCard’, named after the city’s MetroCard used for public transport. Each volunteer received a ZetroCard, which was stamped for every completed canvassing day. After eight canvases, volunteers earned exclusive, limited-edition merchandise—posters and T-shirts—that became coveted symbols of belonging to the movement.
While electoral campaigns depend on owned or rented real estate for party offices, Mamdani's campaign provided the common person with another avenue to participate—by inviting them to be staging hosts. This allowed ordinary people to open their homes to serve as campaign hubs. With over 40 such volunteer-run spaces, the campaign saved resources and reinforced a core organising truth: money is not the most critical asset—committed people are.
With an increasing trend across the world where billionaires sit close to political power, Zohran Mamdani stands as a reminder that people power can still prevail. Community organising demonstrates that power grows when movements invest in people, and transformational change is not built on virality alone, but on organised relationships, shared purpose, and the slow, deliberate work of building trust, one person at a time.
Perhaps the most compelling proof of community organising’s power in also creating local leadership is Zohran Mamdani himself. Just seven years before asking New Yorkers to trust him with the leadership of the largest city in the United States, the former rap musician first entered politics at the doorstep—knocking on doors as a canvasser.
Sapna Saleem is a Harvard University graduate and a former research fellow at the Centre for Public Leadership, Harvard Kennedy School.
Views expressed are the author’s own.