Whitehall MSA crest Whitehall MSAMuslim Student Association

About

Built from
nothing.

For years the MSA was a name on a club list. No fundraisers that went anywhere. No meetings you could count on. No structure, so nothing carried from one month to the next. People showed up when they felt like it, which meant mostly they did not.

In 2025 Rehman Mahmood took it over and rebuilt it from the ground up. Not revived, rebuilt. New structure with named roles and actual accountability. A written chain of command so nothing fell through. Meetings on a real schedule. Fundraisers that were planned, approved, and actually run instead of talked about.

By the end of that year the club was raising real money for real causes, running real programs, and people across the school knew what the MSA was. It went from a name to something students actually wanted to be part of.

The Whitehall MSA, 2025-26

In his own words

Why I did this.

Rehman Mahmood at the Palestine jersey fundraiser

I looked at the MSA and saw holes everywhere. Meetings that did not happen. Fundraisers that never got past talking about them. A club that had a name and nothing behind it. It could have been so much better than it was, and nobody was doing anything about that.

So I prioritized it. I put real time into it when I did not have much to spare, because somebody had to. I rebuilt how it ran from the ground up and turned it into a community instead of a club, somewhere everyone could come and actually have a good time.

What I wanted was a safe place in school. Somewhere Muslim students are supported, where people help each other and grow, and where anybody who walks through the door knows there is a place for them here.

That was the whole goal. Not a name on a list. A room where you belong before you have done anything to earn it.

Rehman Mahmood · President, 2025–2027

What changed

From a name
to an organization.

It was not one big move. It was writing everything down so nothing lived in one person’s head. Giving every job a name so things stopped falling through. Putting meetings on a schedule people could count on. Getting approvals early instead of apologising late. Setting up daily prayer so the club mattered even on days nothing was happening. Then running a fundraiser properly, start to finish, and proving it could be done.

01

Wrote the whole thing down

A full internal operations manual: every role, every responsibility, a chain of command, a fundraising playbook, an approval process. Before this the club knew nothing that was not in one person’s head, so every year started from zero. Now it does not.

02

Made fundraisers actually happen

Planned, approved, staffed and run to a schedule instead of improvised. Money was raised and a real donation went out to a verified charity, with the split stated openly from the first announcement.

03

Stood behind the community

Fundraising directed toward humanitarian relief for children in Palestine, through a vetted organization working with partners on the ground. It drew scrutiny. He took responsibility for it, sat down with the administration, put in writing how the club would operate going forward, and kept the club open.

04

Built the approval discipline

That episode is exactly why nothing goes public now without written approval two weeks ahead. It is not caution for its own sake. A clean record is what lets a club like this ask for bigger things later and get a yes.

05

Made it a place people wanted to be

Talked to every kind of person in the room, not just the ones he already knew. Opened it to students who were not Muslim and meant it. By the end of the year most people were genuinely glad they came, which is the only metric that actually matters.

06

Set up a succession

A President in Training shadows the job for a full year before inheriting it, so the next person starts from where this year ended rather than from nothing. The club is built to outlast whoever is running it.

The point

Everyone graduates. What we build now decides whether this club exists in five years.

The goal was never one good year. It was to leave behind a system strong enough that the person after him starts further along, and the person after that further still.

Who runs it

Leadership.

Every one of these people is reachable. Idea, question, or problem, bring it to any of us. This list grows every year and the old ones stay up.

R
Rehman Mahmood
President

Runs the year. Meetings, plans, approvals, recruitment, and making sure everyone who walks in gets talked to.

T
Tharwat
Vice President

Leads our community and masjid events and the administration channel. First person to go to if something is on your mind.

B
Bayan
Social Media

Runs the Instagram and documents everything we do, so this year actually gets remembered instead of disappearing.

J
Jibril
General Manager

Food, setup, sign-ups, attendance and the service-hour log. If you worked an event, he is the one who signs off.

E
Elhani
President in Training

Learning the job across the whole year and taking it over in 2027–28.

F
Mr. Freeman
Faculty Advisor

Our advisor, and the reason this club is able to do what it does.

R
Rehman Mahmood
President · Founding

Rebuilt the club from nothing. Wrote the operations manual, ran the first real fundraiser in years, and set the standard the club runs on now.

F
Mr. Freeman
Faculty Advisor

Backed the rebuild from the start.

—
The rest of it
Unfilled

There were no other formal roles that year. One person planned it, ran it, sold it and cleaned up after it. That is exactly the problem the 2026–27 structure exists to solve.

The founding year had no Vice President, no General Manager and no Social Media Manager. Everything ran through one person, which worked right up until it did not. Every role on the other tab was written because of something that went wrong this year.