BROOKLYN — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointed Tascha Van Auken as commissioner of the Mayor's Office of Mass Engagement on his second day in office. Mamdani said the office would "fundamentally change" the way New Yorkers related to city government.

Van Auken served as the field director of Mamdani's mayoral campaign, where she oversaw an operation that drew 100,000 volunteers and knocked on an estimated three million doors. Before joining the campaign, she spent nearly ten years in leadership roles in the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. The DSA currently has eight members in the New York State legislature and four in the New York City Council.

The Office of Mass Engagement oversees the Public Engagement Unit, which canvasses apartment buildings to help New Yorkers register for city services, including IDNYC cards and Fair Fares, a program that provides a 50 percent discount on transit for low-income residents. During one canvassing visit, a Public Engagement Unit team member spoke Haitian Creole to reassure a resident who had declined to open his door.

"The skill in developing trust quickly is impressive. You knock more doors, you talk to more people—it's a numbers thing," Van Auken said.

Van Auken grew up in Brooklyn and spent a long stretch of her childhood in Flatbush. Her mother grew up in California and moved to New York in the early 1960s seeking diversity. Her father was an engineer, and her mother worked as a secretary in the same office. Van Auken has two brothers.

At Edward R. Murrow High School in Midwood, Van Auken participated as a performer and as stage crew in theater productions. During her junior year, she and her younger brother took part in an evening of one-act plays. Her family was evicted from their home the same day she performed in a school play. "On the spectrum of folks who are evicted from their homes, we were on the luckier end," she said.

After the September 11 attacks, Van Auken participated in anti-war protests and took the LSAT. In 2005, she took a job as a casting assistant at the Blue Man Group, where she became more comfortable with public speaking as she addressed callback crowds of aspiring Blue Men.

A tabloid predicted that the office would serve as a front for radical activists, wrote that it would hire fifteen associates to provide political propaganda, and compared the office to the Soviet politburo.