Chicago Community Bond Fund is excited to announce our 2022 hires for our Revolving Fund team and our internship program, as well as two new board members who joined us last year.

In September 2022, Zafar Bandukda joined our staff as a second Legal Advocacy Coordinator and will work with the revolving bail fund. CCBF also hired a new group of interns to support our work across several teams. Mahroosa Haideri is our new Law Clerk for the fall semester, and she will work alongside the revolving fund staff. warren wagner and Cyrah Gayle joined our team as interns for the full academic year (September – May). warren is our communications intern, and Cyrah is the advocacy intern. We also want to thank our outgoing summer Law Clerk, Kimberly Martinez, for her excellent work with the revolving fund team.

Finally, CCBF welcomed Ricky Hamilton and Rizwaan Akhtar to the Board of Directors over the summer.

Read more about our new hires and board members below!

Zafar Bandukda (he/him) is a 2022 graduate of the Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Prior to joining the team as Legal Advocacy Coordinator, Zafar volunteered extensively with the Chicago Community Bond Fund. Zafar is an ardent abolitionist and is committed to working towards a future free from oppressive carceral systems. Zafar is also passionate about environmental protection and preservation. He enjoys traveling, camping and hiking, and live music. 

Mahroosa Haideri (she/her) is the CCBF law clerk for this Fall. She is currently a third year law student at UIC Law in downtown Chicago. She has interned with the federal public defenders program as well as Cabrini Green Legal Aid . At Cabrini, she assisted patrons navigate through the expungement and sealing process for their criminal records. 

Originally from Kansas City, KS, Mahroosa received her BS in Youth and Community Studies with a concentration in Social Work from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a Congressional Gold medalist and wishes to dedicate her time fighting for social justice. Mahroosa is very excited to join CCBF and hopes to help individuals affected by our criminal justice system and continue breaking down systemic injustices.

warren wagner (they/she), originally from Sacramento, California, is the 2022-2023 Communications Intern at Chicago Community Bond Fund. They are in their final year at the University of Chicago, where they’ve been fighting for abolition with the #CareNotCops campaign for three years, and where she’s studying Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. She’s also active in local anti-displacement efforts, and the anti-militarist campaign #BoeingArmsGenocide. They’re excited to grow their abolitionist practice and community with the team at CCBF, and to support the movement for pretrial justice however they can!

Cyrah Gayle (she/her) is a second-year at the University of Chicago where she intends to double major in
Business Economics and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. She is interested in the intersections of these two fields and their effects on the systemic flaws of the legal system. Over the summer of 2022, she interned at the Eleventh Judicial Circuit of Florida, receiving a personal perspective of the legal system and how unjust policies impacted many individuals, especially those who were Black. Although she met a few judges who did their best to make fair and informed decisions despite the unjust policy, she saw that those judges were met with direct negative consequences. Inspired by this experience and others, Cyrah aspires to learn more about the efforts of the Chicago Community Bond Fund, and utilize this experience to shape her future research.

Ricky Hamilton (he/him) has fully engaged with the community as an agent of change for equity. Ricky is a Reentry Coordinator for Phalanx Family Services, where he oversees the implementation of the The Reentry Navigation Initiative: Road Home program. He also sits on the Advisory Board for the Education Justice Project for the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, the Reentry Guide Initiative. Ricky sits on the participant Advisory Board for Housing Choice Partners and is Outreach Coordinator for Greenwood Archer Capital, PERC (Pathways [to] Enterprise [for] Returning Citizens), an entrepreneurship program for the formerly incarcerated, and is a member and has co-hosted the Illinois Reentry Council Housing workgroup. Some of Ricky’s other interests are oil painting portraits, fitness, and Ancient African studies. 

Rizwaan Akhtar (he/him) is the Senior Director of Learning, Development, & Inclusion at Leadership for Educational Equity. In this role, he supports educators to engage civically to end the injustice of educational inequity. Rizwaan is a former Local School Council member of Reilly Elementary School in Avondale. Prior to that, he led an international team at World Learning, overseeing an initiative that has trained over 2,500 leaders and helped build stronger peacebuilding efforts in Iraq and the U.S.

His passions include people management, leadership development, and dialogue facilitation. Rizwaan is a Fellow of the American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute, is proficient in Arabic, Spanish, and Urdu, and holds an Executive Nonprofit Management Certificate from Georgetown University, an M.A. in International Education from the SIT Graduate Institute, and a B.A. in Psychology and Middle East Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Welcome to CCBF, everyone! We are grateful to have you on our staff and on the board.