For quite some time Amit Jani, a New Jersey resident who has worked in a legislative capacity for Congresswoman Judy Chu in Washington, D.C., has felt the need to involve South Asians in the political process.
One reason for that, he says, is that while the South Asian-American community has much to be proud of in terms of their contributions to the United States, their political participation at any level of government is not proportionally representative of the population.
In 2015 March, Jani and some like-minded South Asians came up with the idea of a leadership program in New Jersey that will encourage and train young South Asians to get more involved in the political process.
That idea took off last month with the founding of the New Jersey Leadership Program, a non-profit that seeks to help South Asian Americans enter local government and politics. Jani said in a phone interview that already eight young people have been selected from the pool of applicants before the March 31 deadline for the six week leadership program and two to four more people are expected to be included from applicants who applied late in May.
“The internship program will run from July 5 through August 20 and will be conducted by me and advisory council members like Chris Kolluri, former state transportation secretary who is now CEO at Rowan University-Rutgers Camden Board of governors, and Vin Gopal, who has been included in top 100 politically influential people in the “Power List” for 2015 in Politicker, New Jersey, and is chairman of Monmouth County Democratic Party.
The program seeks to expose South Asian youth throughout New Jersey to their local elected representatives and experience firsthand how their local government functions. During the fellowship program the interns will be placed with their local mayor’s office, city agency or state legislator. The internship is supplemented with a speaker series, networking events and career development workshops.
“We hope that by gaining experience in their local government, South Asian youth will go back to their respective schools and realize that they too can be government officials or elected representatives in the future,” said Jani, who is the NJLP president.
He said all too often South Asian parents have high expectations of their children being doctors, lawyers or engineers. “However, careers in public service are a noble calling, and this is something that parents should encourage their children to pursue as well,” he said.
Currently, the South Asian population constitutes over 3.5 percent of New Jersey’s population, but they have less than one percent representation in the state legislature for example, said NJLP vice president Amman Seehra who previously ran for school board in Robbinsville. “In such a diverse state like ours, there should be diverse representation on the municipal, county and state levels of government,” Seehra said.
The goal of the nonprofit is to build a pipeline, in which students can gain experience on the local levels of government through NJLP at an early stage in their lives and then take part in national programs such as the Washington Leadership Program or Asian Pacific American Institute of Congressional Studies internship program, and ultimately enter a career in public service at the level they feel most comfortable.
“Even in New Jersey, people often don’t realize the tremendous diversity of the South Asian community,” said NJLP advisory council member S. Nadia Hussain, a community leader in Paterson and founder of the Bangladeshi American Women’s Development Initiative.
New Jersey encompasses large populations of various South Asian communities across the state, including the Indian communities in Hudson and Middlesex Counties, Bangladeshi communities in Passaic County, and the the NJLP hopes to be inclusive and unite all members of the state’s South Asian communities,’ Jani said.
The post South Asians Launch New Jersey Leadership Program appeared first on News India Times.