MEET IHSSANE
Immigrant, Wall Street Regulator, Social Justice Advocate
I was born into a working class family in Morocco. My mother was a farmer and my father was a public school teacher. At only 13, I lost my father, my hero and the sole bread-winner in our family, to an illness because we couldn’t afford the medication he needed to live. At 17, I had an unsafe, illegal abortion.
At the age of 20, I came to the United States on my own with nothing seeking freedom and security. I worked sub-minimum wage jobs mopping restaurant floors and babysitting. While under the grind of wage theft and sexual harassment, I scraped every dollar I could to put myself through community college. I vowed to dismantle every oppressive system that denies us the basic necessities to live.
I eventually earned a Women in Math scholarship, which gave me the opportunity to attend Boston University where I became the first person in my family to graduate from college, earning a Bachelor's degree in Economics and Math.
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, at a time where our federal government bailed out Wall Street and left working people homeless and hungry, and our States and municipal governments to bankruptcy, I worked on public policy for a large food bank in Philadelphia where I worked to eliminate food deserts and fight State austerity measures to Food Stamps, I worked public finance where I created models that would save municipalities from total wreck, restructured and refinanced their debt and revised their ratings to save taxpayers from paying the toll. I realized that keeping food on the table for families wasn’t going to be a reality for everyone through patchwork, that the biggest Wall Street banks that were deemed “too big to fail” must be stopped from any further gambling with our economy and our livelihood.
That injustice led me to the Federal Reserve, where I took on the financial institutions whose greed and recklessness devastated families across our country. As a Wall Street Regulator at the Federal Reserve my job was to hold the largest financial institutions accountable and protect our economy, and the working families of our country, from another economic crisis. I launched and led federal inter-agency task forces to protect jobs and consumers from national and global threats to our economy, and take a proactive approach to assess, measure and hedge the risks we’re facing, in order to build a resilient economy.
We need leaders who represent our diversity and our courage, who have the lived experiences to lead with compassion, who aren’t afraid to take on corrupt special interests and who know how to get it done.
I have lived the struggle other politicians just talk about. My personal experience living through poverty powers my fight to ensure that no one in the richest country in the world lives is denied basic necessities to live. No one will be a fiercer advocate for working people and the most vulnerable than me.