Six fellows with backgrounds in art, marketing, community organizing, journalism, filmmaking, teaching, youth development and data analysis are learning about critical information needs in our communities. What they find will help them design an innovative project to bring that information back to Chicagoans, so they get involved with the issues that most affect their lives.
Read on to meet our fellows and see how we’re approaching this work differently.
Introducing City Bureau’s Civic Information Fellowship
We’ve overhauled City Bureau’s longest-running program. Here’s why.
Who Are We?
City Bureau Civic Information Fellows spend six months boosting their skills in journalism, community engagement and civic information to develop responsive, people-centered work that helps Chicagoans get more involved in their communities. (Fellow photos by Linze Rice/for City Bureau)
Our Fall 2026 Civic Information Fellows (L-R): Ann Marie Scheffel, Robert Speed, Kesha Selvey, Sol Sanchez, Maia McDonald, Musu Bangura.
Musu Bangura
by Robert Speed
Musu Bangura — a writer, educator, zine-maker, and when the mood strikes, a clothing designer — has spent the last 11 years on the South Side of Chicago. Bangura is a creative who has yet to meet a craft they won't try.
At Rutgers University, they studied English and political science, picked up a minor in social justice and a certificate in women's leadership, then went on for a master's in English.
"Writing is kind of my passion," they said. “It is a thing that I care a lot about. It has shaped really kind of everything that I've done professionally.”
Bangura came to Chicago through City Year, an AmeriCorps program, and has continued working in and around education since, preparing and mentoring students for college. They have taught young girls about the Black radical tradition, which they enjoy because it uses non-traditional techniques outside of the classroom.
"There are so many ways that education is so limiting for people, or so many ways that there are barriers," they said.
These days, Bangura also facilitates zine-making workshops.
"Zines are very punk in the sense that it's not waiting for somebody to tell you that your work is worthy of being out there — it’s putting it out there yourself," they said.
Bangura’s influences are writers who documented what others wouldn't: Assata Shakur, June Jordan and Ida B. Wells.
"Assata Shakur changed my life,” they said. “For her to be imprisoned and still be writing poems about liberation, and to not give up — that was really inspiring for me."
In the City Bureau fellowship, Bangura is thinking about the South and West Sides, and about whom traditional journalism tends to leave out.
"I really want to help people have a platform to tell their stories — especially people that are on the margins," they said.
Robert Speed
by Musu Bangura
Robert Speed is an organizer and storyteller who is passionate about elevating voices.
His organizing work began at 16 as a volunteer with the National Runaway Safeline. As a crisis line advocate, he offered a supportive ear for young people seeking refuge. The experience was so transformative that he became a youth board member at the organization.
He then worked as an organizer at Young Invincibles, where he focused on voter registration, healthy literacy for young people ages 18 to 30 and teaching people how to engage with elected officials. This work led to him joining the City Bureau team as a fellow in Spring 2025 where he got his start as a reporter.
Returning for a second fellowship, he sees his work at City Bureau as a way to udnerstand the holistic person by engaging with people in their neighborhoods and learning what matters most to them through reporting. Advocacy and law are at the heart of his passions.
“I’m such a nerd. I like to read Supreme Court opinions. I do a lot of FOIA work on my own, so I sue the city of Chicago often,” he says with a laugh.
He finds it important to understand how to use these systems and reading up on them helps him. When he isn’t following the lead of legal experts, he can be found watching Bleach, Naruto, or Reasonable Doubt.
He has lived in Houston and Philadelphia but is proud to be a native South Sider, citing food and diversity as his absolute favorite things about living in Chicago.
Offering words of wisdom to his younger self: “Even though life gets hard, just keep going. Find something that you respect that brings you some sort of joy. Focus your mind on that and being a good person doing good things.”
Maia McDonald
By Sol Sanchez
Maia McDonald is a dedicated and decorated intersectional journalist with a love of fashion and family.
A prolific local reporter, she has worked with Free Spirit Media’s The Real Chi, Block Club Chicago, the Chicago Reader, In These Times, The TRiiBE, Borderless Magazine, nvestigative Project on Race and Equity., The Guardian and Teen Vogue.
While at the Investigative Project on Race and Equity, she spearheaded a story co-published with the Chicago Sun-Times about the racial disparities in traffic stops at Illinois college towns, winning multiple Peter Lisagor Awards from the Chicago Headline Club. She has also done immigration reporting informed by her own experience as a second-generation Jamaican immigrant and has extensive experience in maternal health, politics, community and other topics.
She is vice president of the Chicago Journalists Association, working with her fellow board members to bring essential programming to journalists and media-makers in Chicago and Northwest Indiana. She is returning to City Bureau for a second fellowship, previously reporting on temp workers in 2022.
About her signature style: Experimenting during pandemic lockdown, fashion has been a fabulous conduit for her self-expression, taking inspiration inspired by subcultures such as kawaii and Harajuku fashion in Japan. Melding her love of fashion and journalism, writes about fashion, media, and pop culture on her Substack newsletter, maiazine! And you’ll see her report on Chicago Fashion Week taking place in October.
She also enjoys reading, junk journaling, film and gaming, such as Kingdom Hearts 2. She also wants to learn to sew.
Sol Sanchez
By Maia McDonald
At their core, Sol Sanchez is a creative being, someone who brings care, empathy and a unique perspective to all of their endeavors — whether it’s the time they worked as a home healthcare administrator for a family member’s business or their full-time pet care business.
Now they’ve landed at City Bureau, first as a respected Chicago Documenter, now joining the reconfigured Civic Information Fellowship.
Sanchez’s intersecting identities as a queer and nonbinary child of immigrants have also greatly informed their journey to becoming a writer.
Sanchez’s parents emigrated from the Philippines to Chicago. The family later moved to Maryland until Sanchez returned to Illinois to attend University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Majoring in psychology and minored in women’s and gender studies, Sanchez studied the intersections of sociology, mental health and psychology.
“I didn't plan on pursuing journalism or pursuing civic education by any means, but I'm really happy that I did because it really does…just kind of hits all the different passions that I have already,” they said.
A writer and lover of speculative fiction, Sanchez also hopes to infuse their culture and interests into their work. They’re working on a story about the manananggal, a mythical creature from Filipino mythology. They see the project as another way of reconnecting with their heritage as a first-generation immigrant.
As their career progresses, Sanchez will be aiming to do journalism “Sol’s way,” hoping to take up freelance journalism, writing and zine-making as ways of bringing all the different parts of themself together in a meaningful, authentic way.
“I want to integrate my own creativity and imagination and whatnot, and my lived experiences, but I want to also really intentionally go out into the world to other Filipino people, other people in Chicago, because I want to ground it in living as a Chicagoan,” they said. “I just feel like that would be really integral to storytelling and also just being able to expand my perspectives.”
When they’re not working, they enjoy “the whimsical parts of life,” such as gaming, karaoke, dancing, art, online streaming, astrology and tarot card reading.
Ann Marie Scheffel
By Kesha Selvey
After studying social justice and documentary filmmaking years ago, Ann Marie Scheffel put her filmmaking aspirations on hold to raise her five children. Now, with four college graduates and her youngest beginning college, she is pursuing those goals again as a City Bureau fellow.
Although filmmaking took a back seat, her commitment to community never did. She spent seven years caring for family members, working as a substitute teacher in small Catholic schools and remaining active in her community through volunteering and advocacy. Her experiences have strengthened her belief that everyone deserves the opportunity to live with dignity, have their basic needs met and thrive.
She was a community partner in developing Chicago’s Heat Vulnerability Index — described as the nation’s first-of-its-kind community-driven, public-health-based index — and to co-design its StoryMap. She also serves as board president of a nonprofit supporting South and West Side communities.
She sees documentary filmmaking as a way to tell stories that might otherwise go untold and help people recognize what they have in common.
“I think when we’re able to build a connection or understanding or empathy through a story, that makes us more willing to meet people where they’re at,” she said.
That appreciation for connection extends to her personal interests. She loves house music for its ability to bring cultures and generations together. She also enjoys gardening, animals, and spending time with family and friends.
Through her fellowship, she hopes to use storytelling to encourage understanding, strengthen communities and challenge the divisions that keep people apart. Returning to documentary filmmaking is an opportunity to bring together the creativity she has long loved and the community work she never stopped doing.
Kesha Selvey
By Ann Marie Scheffel
Kesha Selvey is bringing her background in marketing to her time as a City Bureau fellowship.
Spending seven years as a spirits marketer, she learned that storytelling is closely ties to power, messaging and controlling the narrative. She feels that if people are not properly oriented, it’s confusing to know what to believe and what decisions to make.
She believes that our history provides the answers, but that people have forgotten our past. Without context, she feels people might repeat the same mistakes that those throughout history have fought so hard to overcome. She plans to use her marketing skills to create a compelling message that explains what democracy is and why participating in the process is important.
One of the most powerful examples of that history is her own family story. Her mother grew up working the fields and left Mississippi as part of the Freedom Movement in 1966 because Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was in Chicago that year. Selvey did not realize until she visited Mississippi herself that the fiels her mother worked were cotton fields. It helped her see how brave her mother was to go head north as an 18-year-old, being part of the Civil Rights movement and to start a family here in Chicago.
Her parents worked hard to set her on a path and she wants to honor that. She wants to honor her community and help where she can. She feels as though City Bureau is a space where she can craft a message about justice, about concern, about community and about caring.