She/Her/Hers
Aysha Mahmood is Senior Programs Manager for Born This Way Foundation. In this capacity, Aysha’s responsibilities include editing Channel Kindness stories, supporting the program’s youth participants, and helping to maintain Channel Kindness’ social media accounts. Before joining Born This Way Foundation, Aysha earned her B.A. in journalism and political science from the University of Connecticut. Upon graduation, she worked as a reporter for The Journal Inquirer and then as a press aide for Connecticut House Democrats.
In her role with the foundation, Aysha has used her writing background to help youth craft over 2,000 stories on Channel Kindness. Her own creative work has been supported by the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, VONA Voices, and Yale Writers’ Workshop. In 2024, she completed a fiction residency at Juniper Summer Writing Institute where she worked on her literary fiction novel. You can find Aysha’s poetry and fiction in Salamander, LEON Literary Review, Milk Candy Review, and Emerge Literary Journal, amongst others, and her nonfiction work in HuffPost, Teen Vogue, and Nylon. Aysha is a proud alum of Obama Foundation’s Community Leadership Corps, Google News Initiative Start Ups Lab, and Inkluded Academy, a mentorship program that amplifies BIPOC voices in the publishing field.