Co-Founder & Executive Director

Ilaha Eli Omar is an Afghan-American grassroots mobilizer and humanitarian aid expert with over two decades of experience facilitating aid delivery to minority communities in developing countries, including orphans, the ultra-poor, and people with disabilities. Her work has primarily focused on her country of birth, Afghanistan, as well as Haiti and Kenya. Ilaha is a champion of women’s rights, supporting various women’s self-sufficiency programs such as Project Artemis, a Goldman Sachs-funded initiative, where she worked with women entrepreneurs to build, manage and expand their businesses in the private sector of Afghanistan. A successful businesswoman herself, Ilaha co-founded a technology consulting company which she later sold in 2017. She serves in a voluntary capacity on the advisory councils and boards for several non-profits that champion work close to her heart, including Children of War Foundation, Enabled Children Initiative, World Orphan Foundation, and Mahtabe. She is also a member of the US-Afghan Women’s Council. Ilaha earned a Global MBA from Thunderbird School of Global Management and resides in Southern California.

Co-Founder & Director of Strategy

Mousqa Katawazi is a counselor/educator and social justice advocate with over 20 years of experience working with diverse communities, including refugee and immigrant families, veterans and service members, and K-12 and college students. Her commitment is to developing educational programs that cultivate empathy and compassion for all beings. Mousqa also has over 7 years of experience in the non-profit sector, and currently serves on the board of an organization dedicated to the training and development of mental health professionals from diverse backgrounds. In her free time, Mousqa enjoys playing with her dogs and learning about plants.

Deputy Director

Ayscha Hamdani is an Afghan-German with twenty years of experience in international development for NATO, EU, UN, and key Afghan institutions. Her focus is on conflict resolution, negotiation and mediation, political advisory, and strategy development. She has lived and worked in Afghanistan for over a decade and traveled to every one of its provinces. Ayscha is connected to a wide network of civil society actors, grassroots activists and public and security sector employees across the country, Afghan diaspora, as well as key decision-makers in governments across the globe. Ayscha is an advocate for human equality, in particular for women and children, supporting their medical treatments and education abroad. She is based in Zurich, Switzerland.

Director of Humanitarian Relief

Hila-Nawa Alam is an Afghan-German development practitioner with almost two decades of progressively responsible work experience globally. She has worked with the United Nations in different functions in Beirut, Kabul, and Vienna. In Afghanistan, Hila has been active on the grassroots level with civil society and local NGOs since 2003, most notably by founding and coordinating a sponsorship program for formerly street-working children. Hila also has experience in international diplomacy and has worked across Afghan national institutions where she focused on aid effectiveness and technical cooperation management. In addition to her professional background in development, she also headed a bilingual elementary school in New York City. Hila holds an MSc in Social and Economic Sciences from Vienna University and is a senior fellow with the think tank 'Open Diplomacy’ in Paris, France. In her current role as Director of Humanitarian Relief with Uplift, Hila is overseeing the design, planning, implementation, and monitoring & evaluation of the organization’s Humanitarian Fund.

Director of Technology

Israr Ahmad Karimzai, is an award-winning software developer, entrepreneur, and political activist. He has co-founded ZOOTZOOT - a food and grocery delivery app and Aflytics - a data collection, aggregation, analytics, and visualization platform. In addition, Israr founded Weekh Zwanano Ghorzang (Awakened Youth Movement) in 2007 to promote democracy, equality, progress, and to counter extremism and foreign interference. As the leader of this youth movement, he has organized numerous rallies against foreign-backed terrorism in Afghanistan including a seven months-long sit-in in 2018 in Kabul.

Israr also has served in the government of Afghanistan, starting in 2015 as the Director of ICT and eGovernance in the Office of the President of Afghanistan where led a team of 60 to digitally transform the presidential palace. In addition, he served in the Ministry of Defense as Senior Tactical Communications Advisor to the Minister. During this assignment, he established the Situation Analysis and Reporting Unit, an effective tool for emergency communications and support to the most remote outposts of the Afghan National Army. Israr was also a board director for the Afghan Peace Watch where he created https://riv-monitoring.vercel.app . A site broadly used by media organizations as a real-time tool for reporting casualties and monitoring the metrics on the so-called reduction of violence by Taliban.

Partner, Civil Engagement Project Director

Marika Theros is a policy fellow at the London School of Economics based at LSE IDEAS, and has worked at the intersection of research, policy and civic engagement over the last 15 years. Her research focuses on political mobilization, civic activism, global-local dynamics of violence, and the impact of international interventions on the prospects for justice and security for local communities. She has designed a number of research and dialogue processes in the Balkans, South Asia and the Middle East, in order to support multi-level, multi-dimensional peace-making and peace-building approaches. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Institute for State Effectiveness and at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, and co-founder of the Civic Ecosystems Initiative. She has been engaged on Afghanistan since 2007, most recently supporting peace and civil society initiatives including grassroots networks. Marika is completing her doctorate in International Development at LSE, and holds an M.A. in International Affairs from the Columbia University and an MSc in Human Rights from LSE.

Director of Communications

Kat Corwin is a communications specialist based in New York City with experience in social media and public relations. She has a B.A. in Political Science from Boston University, where her studies focused primarily on democracy, social movements, and urban governance in the Global South. Kat is passionate about advocating for women's rights and striving for a more equitable future. She works to bridge the gap between Uplift’s work and its donors and supporters.

Country Director, Pakistan

Ahmad Bilal Niazi was born in Logar province of Afghanistan. Bilal has a Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration from Khana-e-Noor Educational Network. Over the past seven years, he has gained valuable experience working with various companies and NGOs in field coordination, financial management, and project management. In the wake of the events in Afghanistan in 2021, he relocated to Pakistan and began supporting Afghan refugees in the social work and education sectors. Currently, Bilal serves as Uplift’s Country Director in Pakistan supporting at-risk Afghan refugees in the resettlement and acculturation process.

Bilal firmly believes that contributing to humanitarian efforts not only brings luck but also aligns with his philosophy: "In seeking happiness for others, I found it for myself.”

EXPERT

Megan Minnion is a Canadian citizen with 25 years’ experience in the defence and security sector. For close to six years, she worked in Afghanistan for the United Nations, NATO, USFOR-A and an NGO to which she helped set up with a group of friends. A former soldier and electronic warfare specialist, Megan, for years, did volunteer work in Canada’s penitentiaries before moving on to work in international organizations and development agencies. Megan is a proud mom of two children, loves biking and placed eighth in Nepal’s World Elephant Polo Championship.

EXPERT

Ghulam Rasoul Rasouli is a senior development practitioner with 27 years of specialty in Community Driven Development Organization (CDDO), governance, rural development, and building community resilience in conflict, post-conflict and fragile contexts. Rasouli has extensive experience working with governments, donors, multilateral organizations (United Nations agencies & World Bank), and international NGOs. Rasouli's work experience includes over 12 years working in key managerial positions (Director General, Executive Director, Director of Operations) in two large CDDO programs namely - The National Solidarity Program and the Citizens’ Charter Program. Rasouli also served as a member of the sub-national governance policy development task force in Afghanistan. Currently, he is working as CDDO’s international consultant with the World Bank as well as with the Institute for State Effectiveness where he is supporting context assessment and program design in Afghanistan and Sierra Leone.

EXPERT

Kayhan Irani is an Emmy-award winning writer, a performer, a cultural activist, and a Theater of the Oppressed trainer. She creates storytelling spaces to build community, offer healing, and to re-connect participants to their innate creative power. She works internationally and in the U.S. with community organizations, social service providers, educational providers, and government agencies to expand what’s possible when we deepen our relationships through story.

Kayhan was one of ten artists named by President Obama’s White House as a 2016 White House Champion of Change for her storytelling work. Her one-woman show, We've Come Undone toured nationally and internationally, telling stories of Arab, South Asian and Muslim-American women in the wake of 9/11. She was a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Researcher and has trained hundreds of groups in Theater of the Oppressed and participatory storytelling tools over the years, both nationally and overseas, in Afghanistan, India, and Iraq.

She is currently building There is a Portal, an immersive digital experience, pedagogy, and refugee leadership development model that asks how we can create networks of belonging even when we feel most broken. Kayhan is passionate about harnessing the wellspring of cultural knowledge that Afghans hold to uplift and transform our world and enrich the soil for generations to come.

EXPERT

Farnoosh Hashemian is an Iranian-American lawyer with a strong background in human rights, access to justice, and global health. She developed deep love and respect for Afghan people while working in and out of the country for many years. Notably, from 2014-2018, she was Open Society Foundations Afghanistan Technical Advisor, providing legal support to a coalition of justice and human rights partners who worked on developing Afghanistan’s groundbreaking anti-torture law. In response to the crisis, she co-founded Afghan Legal Empowerment Portal, and now co-leads coordination and collaboration efforts of ATLAS Women Network Afghanistan Emergency Task Force -- a network of 467+ women international lawyers who came together to protect vulnerable Afghans. The network won the PILnet 2021 Pro Bono Publico Award in recognition of its collective efforts to assist Afghans in grave need.

Throughout her career, Farnoosh has sought to honor the work of justice defenders who came before her, build on collective local wisdom, and do the deliberate and careful intersectional work in pursuit of gender and border justice. In her view, it is indeed a feminist’s job to counter the alarming overuse of policing, surveillance, detention, and oppressive measures in the war on terror, the war on drugs, and the war on migrants.

EXPERT

Sahar Halaimzai is an Afghan-British rights advocate, writer, and human rights campaigner. Her experience includes seven years as the Global Head of Campaigns and Communications for the worldwide literary organization, PEN International where her work focused on bringing the voices of marginalized and silenced individuals and communities to center stage. In 2018, she received the inaugural London Writers Award and is now working on her first book. She is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council in the US, where her work focuses on human rights and Afghanistan, and is the Deputy Director of the Afghanistan Engagement Project supported by The Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

In 2019 she co-founded and today leads the Afghan campaign, Time4RealPeace, to counteract the exclusion of Afghan women, civil society, and minorities from policy discussion and public debate on Afghanistan. The core of the groups mission, which is made of a coalition of activist and rights groups from Afghanistan and the diaspora, is to capacity-build, provide a platform and amplify the voice of Afghans.

EXPERT

Elizabeth Rubin is a journalist who has covered conflict around the world for two decades writing about how narrative is wielded by the people she encounters--leaders, activists, artists, mothers, soldiers, war-makers, and children. She has lived and worked in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Chechnya, Russia, Uganda, South Africa, Sierra Leone, the Balkans, Haiti, the Middle East, Indonesia, and the USA. She has published stories and essays in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Bidoun, Vogue, The Intercept. She is a recipient of the Livingston Award for Young Journalists, the Bayeux-Calvados Award for War Correspondents, the Kurt Schork Award, and the John Jay Award from Columbia College. She received a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, the Edward R. Murrow Fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Cullman Fellowship for Scholars at the New York Public Library. She’s currently at work on a book about power, inspiration, and madness called The Charismatics. Elizabeth is involved with the evacuations of at-risk Afghans.

EXPERT

Bahar Amini is an Afghan-American social worker with a passion for advocacy and restoration in marginalized communities.

Bahar completed her B.A. in Psychology at California State University, Fullerton, and her M.A. in Social Work at California State University, Dominguez Hills.

Over the past several years, Bahar has worked with foster youth through case management, supporting former foster youth and foster families in crisis management, and performing psychosocial assessments for patients as a hospice social worker. She is currently working at the California Foster Care Ombudsperson Office upholding foster youth rights. Bahar has previously volunteered with the Enabled Children Initiative, a nonprofit that supports children with disabilities in Afghanistan. Since November 2021, Bahar has been working with Institute for State Effectiveness for their Afghanistan Support Program as an Interim Project Assistant.

In her free time, Bahar enjoys reading, being in nature, learning about energy work, and spending time with her community.

EXPERT

Tamim is an Afghan-American with a passion for the arts, music, and their intersection with technology. He is a graduate of the University of California, San Diego with a B.A. in Economics and a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts. Tamim also holds a MM of Music Technology from New York University. Tamim’s mother affectionately describes him as “a DJ with a masters degree”.

Tamim strives to bring positive change to communities around the world and to the people he meets everyday. When he’s not hooping, or on the turntables, you can find him strategizing influencer partnerships for some of the biggest companies in the world. On his days off he likes to volunteer with nonprofits that aim to positively impact at risk communities both domestically and abroad.

EXPERT

Afifa Zaman is an Afghan-American counselor and educator with over ten years of experience in higher education. She is based in Southern California and serves as a tenured faculty counselor at a community college, which provides open-access and low-cost higher education. After graduating from San Diego State University (SDSU) with a degree in Liberal Studies (K-6 education), she earned a Master’s Degree in Counseling with an emphasis in Multicultural Community Counseling from SDSU’s Community-Based Block (CBB) program. She is currently pursuing a Doctorate of Education (Ed.D.) in Educational Leadership with a concentration in Educational Psychology at the University of Southern California (USC).

Afifa’s educational philosophy centers on education as a “practice of freedom” (Freire, 1978). She believes that meaningful, high-quality education is a critical part of individual empowerment, transformative social justice, and collective liberation. As such, she strives to increase educational access, retention, and student equity through her daily work and advocacy. She hopes that every individual will see their rights to education and safety actualized so that they not only survive but thrive in the world.

EXPERT

Alexa Greenwald is an international development professional with focus on gender, protection, governance, strategic communications, research, and monitoring and evaluation. She has been working in Afghanistan since 2016 and helped lead Sayara international’s evacuation efforts from August to December of last year. Prior to Kabul’s fall, she served as Program Manager for various donor clients in Afghanistan including the European Union, UK Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), Australian DFAT, USAID, the World Bank and others. During her time at Sayara International, she served as Regional Manager overseeing their Afghanistan and Pakistan offices including managing local teams, client relations, and leading business development efforts. Alexa has over eight years of proposal development experience designing programming, budgets, implementation plans and teams in contexts across East Africa, Central and South Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Prior to working in Afghanistan, Alexa managed and helped expand an international women, peace and security platform across seven countries for the Austria-based NGO Women without Borders.

Co-Founder Emeritus

Madeena Rafiq is an Afghan-American with a passion for social justice, advocacy for sidelined communities, and has expertise in corporate social responsibility programs. For over 12 years, Madeena has been involved in refugee resettlement, humanitarian aid work, and fundraising efforts for underserved communities. She holds a B.A. in International Development from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.A. in International Business from Universidad Camilo Jose Cela de Madrid, Spain. Madeena has over six years of nonprofit management and fundraising experience, working as Executive Director of the World Affairs Council of Orange County, California.