The deputy director of the ACLU of Michigan learned U.S. immigrants’ hardships as a child, and has brought those teachings to her work.

Elmir, who is Muslim, now builds community trust, speaks on marginalization and coordinates internal affairs for the civil rights organization, which she joined in 2006. What the 35-year-old thinks about most is “co-powering”— empowerment on a level playing field.

“When I think about the work I do in communities … I work for my mother,” she said.

Elmir, her parents and her three siblings fled Lebanon in 1986, arriving in Dearborn to a country that sometimes showed disdain. As a child, Elmir chose not to translate slurs directed at her parents. Her mother told stories “punctuated by anti-immigrant bias, by anti-Muslim sentiment.”

Elmir remembers her quiet frustration bubbled up when she was reprimanded after she hadn’t brought a book to start studying again after finishing a test early.

Her teacher said: “I don’t know what they do in your country, but here in America we bring our books to class.”

Elmir responded assertively and was told to leave the classroom after refusing to sit. From outside, rage boiling over, she reopened the door and let loose “a series of really awful names.”

Her approach with the teacher certainly wasn’t a success.

“Nonetheless, it’s failure of a just cause that keeps us going. I don’t feel like I can sit out a fight,” she said.

Hassan Jaber, the CEO of the Dearborn-based Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, said he noticed Elmir for her public speaking after she first joined the ACLU more than 10 years ago: embracing, but also confronting, challenging subjects. More recently, Elmir has influenced ACCESS in an advisory role, including helping it evaluate its communication infrastructure.

“Her convictions are deep and real and are tested on a daily basis,” Jaber said.

Wayne County’s Economic Development Growth Engine, or EDGE, the department was the brainchild of the previous administration and was seen as a poor-performing program that the cash-strapped county could no longer afford.

“I told him he should just eliminate the department altogether,” Rahal said.

Rahal recommended a new mission for economic development for Wayne County — one focused on offloading costly real estate assets, creating more development-ready sites and tackling issues that affect the region’s competitiveness, such as transit, talent readiness and the high cost of auto insurance.

“And then he said, ‘Well, good, because I want you to run it,’” Rahal recalled Evans saying. “And I remember thinking to myself, ‘OK, if I knew you were going to say that, then I wouldn’t have told you to get rid of the department.’”

That’s how Rahal found himself running a one-man economic development department for Michigan’s largest county and the 19th largest county in the country.

Rahal, 37, is now an assistant county executive under Evans with a focus on repurposing underused or vacant county-owned properties and taking on structural issues that affect metro Detroit’s economic competitiveness.

Under Rahal’s direction, the county secured a deal to sell the former Standard Accident Insurance Co. building at 640 Temple St. for $11 million to a development group that plans a $65 million makeover for the building, including a new boutique hotel.

Rahal was the point man for Wayne County in securing a deal with the Moroun family’s Crowne Enterprises to buy the polluted former McLouth Steel Products Corp. steel plant in Trenton. Crowne and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have a deal in place for a Superfund cleanup at the 180-acre steel plant site as well as an adjacent 70-acre property the Morouns own in Riverview.

In June, Wayne County inked a deal Rahal helped engineer with Southfield-based Morgan Development to sell the long-abandoned Eloise Hospital Complex in Westland for $1. The agreement stipulated that the developer has to invest $20 million in revitalizing the one-time psychiatric asylum, which Wayne County had owned since the late 1800s.

Maintenance and security at the Eloise complex was at least $500,000 annually for a vacant and blighted property that was a destination for urban explorers, Rahal said.

“Part of our recovery plan, financially, was to sell off excess assets, get them back on the tax rolls, create jobs, create investments, squeeze as much juice out of them as possible,” Rahal said.

Compiled by Arab America