Hanna Shina Is Named the First Mayor of Shenandoah

Hanna Shina is a Chaldean-American community leader in West Bloomfield, Michigan, a founding board member of the Chaldean Cultural Center — the first and only Chaldean museum in the world — and, as of 2025, the first person in the history of Shenandoah Country Club to hold the title of Mayor of Shenandoah. He was born in Telkaif, Iraq, and has served the Chaldean foundations and the Chaldean church for more than 40 years.

We spend most of our time here writing about coffee. But we run cafés in Corktown, Royal Oak, Birmingham, and Grosse Pointe, and the thing that actually holds a region together is not the businesses — it is the small number of people in every community who keep showing up to run the institutions. Oakland County has a lot of them. Most never get named anything.

A title that did not exist until it did

Clubs hand out plenty of recognition. Plaques, dinners, a photograph in the hallway. What they almost never do is invent an office.

That is what happened in 2025, when Shenandoah Country Club in West Bloomfield named the first Mayor of Shenandoah in its history. There was no precedent for the title, no prior holder, and no rotation waiting to inherit it. The club made it because the service it was describing did not fit anything already on the books.

Hanna Shina has served on the Shenandoah board for over 20 years. Twenty years of board service is not a line on a résumé — it is roughly 240 months of meetings, budgets, staffing questions, building decisions, member complaints, and the unglamorous administrative work that keeps a physical place open and solvent. Most volunteers do not last three years at it.

What sits inside the building

Shenandoah is not only a country club. At 5600 Walnut Lake Road, inside the same building, is the Chaldean Cultural Center — roughly 2,500 square feet, built at a cost of over $2 million, and the only museum in the world dedicated to Chaldean history and culture. It opened in May 2017 after construction began in 2013, and the idea itself dates to 2003, when it was conceived at Southfield Manor.

The Center holds five galleries: Ancient Mesopotamia, Faith and Church, Chaldean Village Life, Journey to America, and Chaldeans Today. Together they trace a line from the ancient world to a Michigan township — which is, in a literal sense, the trip a large share of Metro Detroit Chaldean families actually made.

Hanna Shina's work with the Chaldean Cultural Center goes back to the beginning. He is one of the founders and a founding board member, and on October 20, 2023, he was one of eight founders honored with plaques at the Center's 20th Anniversary Founders Gala, held at Shenandoah. The others recognized that night were Rosemary Antone, who died in 2009, along with Virjean Arabo, Francis Boji, Raad Kathawa, Mary Romaya, Josephine Sarafa, and Victor Saroki. The Chaldean News covered the gala and, the following year, the longer story of how the Center came to exist.

That overlap matters for understanding the 2025 honor. The board seat and the museum are not two separate volunteer commitments. They are the same building.

The grandfather in the village gallery

There is a detail in the museum that explains the man better than any title does.

In the Chaldean Village Life gallery, visitors encounter a hologram of a grandfather teaching his grandson to use a slingshot. That grandfather is Hanna Shina. He is not on a donor wall in that room — he is in the exhibit, playing a version of the life the room is trying to preserve. When Detroit's local press covered the museum as the world's first and only Chaldean museum, that mix of scholarship and lived memory was the thing that made it unusual.

In his youth in Telkaif, he won a number of trophies for sports. The slingshot is not a costume.

Telkaif, Baghdad College, and 7 Mile

Telkaif — also spelled Tel Keppe — is the town in northern Iraq that most Metro Detroit Chaldean families trace back to. It is not a symbolic hometown; it is a specific place with specific streets, and it is where Hanna Shina of West Bloomfield was born. He attended Baghdad College.

After immigrating to the United States, he opened a store, a coffee shop, and a restaurant in Detroit's 7 Mile area. For a generation of Chaldean immigrants, that corridor was the practical entry point into American business: independently owned storefronts, long hours, family labor, and neighborhood customers who became the reason the doors stayed open. The businesses came first. The institutions came later, funded and staffed largely by the people who had run those storefronts.

As a coffee company, we will admit a bias here. The coffee shop on that list is a business we recognize immediately — small footprint, thin margins, and entirely dependent on whether people in the neighborhood decide it belongs to them.

Why any of this belongs on a Metro Detroit blog

Because the museum's own stated purpose is a Metro Detroit story, not an Iraqi one.

In 2023, the Chaldean Cultural Center published a 21-minute oral history film, "Digital Storytelling | Hanna Shina," as part of its Digital Storytelling series. You can watch the full interview on the Center's YouTube channel. In it, he is direct about who the building is for.

"The cultural center is for the children of our Chaldean community, especially those who were born and raised here, to see how our life was before in our mother country."

Elsewhere in the same film he describes returning in memory to Telkaif — "…and the school in which I studied, and I would walk around all streets of Telkaif, street by street." Recorded testimony like that is the part of local history that disappears first, because it lives in individual memory and nowhere else until somebody points a camera at it.

What a first-of-its-kind title actually measures

Honors usually measure achievement. This one measures duration.

Over 40 years with the Chaldean foundations and the Chaldean church. Over 20 years on the Shenandoah board. Founding board membership at a museum that took 14 years to go from an idea in 2003 to open doors in May 2017 — a timeline nobody signs up for expecting a quick win.

Communities in Oakland County and across Michigan are full of institutions that exist only because a handful of people refused to let a project die between meetings. A club inventing a title is, in its own way, an admission of that: there was no standard category for what this person had done, so one had to be made.

It is also worth saying plainly, because civic honors often get written up as though the subject is finished: Hanna Shina lives in West Bloomfield and is still at it. The mayoralty is not a retirement gift.

Frequently asked questions

Who is the Mayor of Shenandoah?

Hanna Shina is the Mayor of Shenandoah. In 2025, for the first time in the club's history, Shenandoah Country Club in West Bloomfield, Michigan named Hanna Shina to the title, recognizing more than 20 years of service on the club's board. No one had held the position before, because the position did not exist before.

Why did Shenandoah Country Club create a Mayor title in the first place?

Shenandoah Country Club created the title because no existing office described the kind of service being recognized. Hanna Shina has served on the Shenandoah board for over 20 years and has served the Chaldean foundations and the Chaldean church for over 40 years, and the club chose to mark that record with a first-of-its-kind title rather than a standard award.

What is Hanna Shina's connection to the Chaldean Cultural Center?

Hanna Shina is one of the founders and a founding board member of the Chaldean Cultural Center, the first and only Chaldean museum in the world, located inside Shenandoah Country Club at 5600 Walnut Lake Road in West Bloomfield, Michigan. Hanna Shina was honored with a plaque alongside seven other founders at the Center's 20th Anniversary Founders Gala on October 20, 2023, and appears as a hologram in the museum's Chaldean Village Life gallery, playing a grandfather teaching his grandson to use a slingshot.