At the 2026 Ali Leadership Institute Gala at Liberty House on Sunday, former state Senator Ray Lesniak (D-20) said the non-profit’s co-founder “was going somewhere” when discussing the youth and the future of both New Jersey and the nation.
By Dan Israel/Hudson County View
The event, which was held at the Liberty House in Jersey City on Sunday, August 2nd, celebrated graduating institute students and featured remarks the likes of Ali, fellow co-founder Abeera Saeed, Hudson County Commissioner Bill O’Dea (D-2), Jersey City Mayor James Solomon, and Lesniak.
O’Dea, a political mentor of Ali, noted how they both continue to teach other new things.
“That’s what proteges do. The teacher will trick you to learn when you were young,” the veteran elected official began.
According to O’Dea, he has been honored to be there to lead the toast for the gala since it started eight years again, having worked with a number of the graduates on initiatives like literacy at the Hudson County Correctional Facility or the food pantry in Lincoln Park.
“That’s a program that continues to operate today,” he noted.
He concluded he’s looking forward to seeing what potential programs graduates may want to establish this year that he can collaborate with them on as they move forward into the word.
“So if we could raise our glasses, I just want to say to the Ali Leadership Institute, who takes our young people and shows them how important they are as our future, how their ideas and suggestions are things that we need, and that we can learn from, and that hopefully we can always work together to implement them.”
After O’Dea, Solomon thanked involved stakeholders as well as all supporters of the Ali Leadership Institute.
“The numbers are incredible. After eight years, you’ve got over 200 young people, 200 leaders in training, given access to be able to ask their questions, to be able to deepen their vision and their leadership. And that is truly a special gift,” the mayor expressed.
According to Solomon, leadership isn’t fixed, but is a skill that can be crafted.
“Too often we think that, okay, I was born with this or not, but no, leadership is a skill and it’s grown. It’s important for every young person in this room to believe that you have that innate inside you and that you can grow it through both these programs and through challenging yourself,” he said.
“And that is something that, as many of you young people in Jersey City, Hudson County, and New Jersey, that your leadership is necessary for us as a city, as a state, as a country, to actually be what we want.”
Solomon also said that young people’s leadership is often diminished or “not respected for what it is.”
Solomon also called being a professor at Hudson County Community College (HCCC) and Saint Peter’s University a great experience since because of his student, who “were an incredible source of inspiration for me.”
Harkening back to the 2025 mayoral race, Solomon said he never considered Ali nor O’Dea opponents, but quoted O’Dea that they were competitors with a common end goal for Jersey City.
“It’s what let us come together at the end, because we knew that we couldn’t let the city go backwards to a track of being run by a political machine, and certainly we had to push it in a new direction for change,” he said.
“That’s why both Bill and Mussab have been such extraordinary friends as we’ve been governing, as we’ve been going through the next six months, and why their leadership is so crucial to the future of our city.”
During her remarks, Saeed noted how she taught her first session eight years ago when she was 19, even though the cohort was for students ages 16 to 22 – although she has grown a lot since then alongside the Ali Leadership Institute.
According to Saeed, programs like those hosted by the Ali Leadership Institute are important, especially in urban areas.
“When my brother Mussab Ali was 20, he rallied a group of essentially his friends to run a grassroots board of education campaign led entirely by young people,” Saeed said.
“The promise was that a board member who looked like the constituency it served would be a good advocate for the students in our public schools.”
After his victory, Saeed said those who rallied behind Ali at the time were excited to do more but had nothing to do with that momentum – which is where the Ali Leadership Institute comes in.
“Our family knew that once this energy dissipated, it would be hard to recreate. So we sat around the kitchen table and decided, instead of giving them explicit directions of what to do and essentially just feeding them with fish for a day, we’d teach them how to fish for themselves,” Saeed said.
“The hunger, in this case, was for opportunities to practice civic leadership. The fishing poles were the mentorship and knowledge to help students design their own civic engagement projects. And the bait was the fundraising skills they needed to finance their own solutions.”
In 2019, there were just five students at the Ali Leadership Institute. Since then, they have graduated almost 200 young leaders from the program.
“We’ve built an incredible board. We’ve partnered with organizations like the PSE&G Foundation, Barrow Mansion, the Nyamwange Foundation, and Jersey City Public Libraries for space and financial support. And we’ve hosted speakers ranging from politicians to CEOs to non-profit leaders to youth activists and so on,” Saeed recalled.
“Our graduates have gone on to colleges like Yale, Harvard- Yale comes before Harvard- UPenn, Columbia, and NYU, and have tackled a range of pressing issues, including, but not limited to homelessness, youth screen time dependency, period poverty, and the lack of opportunities for youth advocacy, journalism, and community service.”
Saeed forwent harping about the Institute’s growth and impact further to instead highlight how students have changed by time they complete the program.
Following Saeed, Lesniak began by jokingly referencing his long tenure in the statehouse and time since spent retired.
“It’s a great honor and I have to confess that, until I arrived here today, Mussab did not tell me why I was getting this award. After 40 years, I’ve done a lot right? By the way, I was first elected to the Senate when I was 12 years old,” he joked.
According to Lesniak, he was impressed by Ali’s determination to meet with Lesniak during last year’s mayoral race despite his support for Solomon.
“What impressed me most about Mussab wasn’t his degrees from Rutgers, Tsinghua, and Harvard Law School. It wasn’t his organizing ability or being elected to serving as president of the Jersey City Board of Education,” Lesniak declared.
“What impressed me most is when he insisted on meeting with me when he was running for Jersey City mayor, despite me telling him I’m supporting James Solomon. Sorry Bill O’Dea. Mussab wanted to meet with me while I was supporting his opponent. I said to myself, that young man is going somewhere. And he is.”
Lesniak, who turned 80 in May, said as he is getting older, he is not getting more conservative, but actually more progressive.
He continued that wealthy Americans need to pay their fair share of taxes to fund programs like childcare for all alongside other initiatives like increasing the national minimum wage from $7.25.
“That’s America at its best. And let’s increase the minimum wage. It’s $7.25 an hour. That’s not going to put food on the table and pay the rent. New Jersey’s minimum wage is $15.92 an hour with yearly increases based on inflation,” Lesniak asserted.
He later said that if the federal minimum wage increased based on inflation during Trump’s administration, it would be over $20 an hour by now.
“These aren’t communist views. They’re not socialist views. They’re American views built on the foundation of our Constitution and the development of our nation to be a more perfect union.”
Lesniak closed by having his staffer hand out dark blue “Make America Kind Again” hats to Ali, O’Dea, and Solomon: “Mayor Solomon, this young man is going somewhere.”
Closing out the dignitaries were remarks from Ali himself, who began by thanking all those in attendance as well as individuals involved in the program in any way.
When he started the program, Ali said he had no idea it would evolve into this before noting he had been reflecting on the past year-and-a-half or so when he lost the Jersey City mayoral race and the Democratic primary for Congress in the 8th District.
“I’ve taken two political losses very publicly: It’s not easy to lose.”
On top of that, Ali’s grandmother passed away two months ago, someone he missed after returning from Michigan campaigning for a fellow progressive candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
“This is someone whose life story is just incredible. She’s a woman who grew up actually in a wealthy household. And as she grow up, she lost everything. Her father lost all of their wealth. And so imagine being at the height of society and losing everything. And then suddenly, you have eight children and your child decides to come to America and takes him with you,” he recalled.
“My grandmother didn’t speak any English, but she was the person that raised me and my siblings. And so I think about what life must have been like from her perspective, to start at a place where you were so wealthy, to come down and have to rebuild all over, to come to a foreign nation, where you didn’t know anyone or anything, and yet she invested so much in us.”
According to Ali, his grandmother also used to attend this gala every year.
“I think about her memory because she used to say to me after these events how happy she was to see the way that we invest in our community,” Ali said.
“So when I think about leadership, I think about the people whose names we often don’t talk about. Look, when we think about communities, communities don’t need more celebrities. We don’t need more influencers. We don’t need people who are chasing clout, as Gen Z, would say.”
Ali recalled the start of his own political career, how people would often say that he is too young, “too crazy,” or that his opinion didn’t matter because of his age.
“All these years later, the thing I am most proud of is the fact that we have invested in so many young people who can see their place in the world,” he stated.
In conclusion, Ali held a moment of silence for his late grandmother, before the evening continued with the handing out of certificates to graduates and speeches from students as dinner and dessert were served.