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| Affiliation | Democratic |
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2021-01-01 |
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| Name | Nithya Raman |
| Address |
Los Angeles, California , United States |
| Email | None |
| Website | [Link] |
| Born |
July 28, 1981
(42 years)
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| Contributor | RBH |
| Last Modifed | Juan Croniqueur
Feb 18, 2024 02:21pm |
| Tags |
Indian - Democratic Socialists Of America -
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| Info | I was born in Kerala, India, and moved to Louisiana when I was six before my family settled in Massachussetts. I didn’t have many classmates who looked like me in the Boston public schools I grew up in, and I was often pretty lonely. I watched a lot of TV – a lot of Comedy Central – and I studied hard. After graduating from Harvard and training in urban planning at MIT, I went to India and worked in Delhi and Chennai taking on extreme poverty, fighting for basic necessities like water, plumbing, and shelter.
I moved to Los Angeles, an incredible, beautiful, diverse city that became the first place that really felt like home to me. My husband and I got married and started a family - I am a mother of twin second graders whom I love more than I have words to express.
But as we were making our home in LA, I saw and felt a crisis growing around us, with more and more people falling into homelessness every year and more tents on our city’s streets. I co-founded a volunteer group with my friends to try and help people experiencing homelessness in my own neighborhood. The group SELAH grew quickly, driven by a sense of urgency for change.
Through our volunteer work on the ground, we saw that our system was so flawed: so much more could be done to ensure that people experiencing homelessness could move back indoors. I met with local officials to share how things could be improved, but rarely saw corresponding action. I remember feeling that the urgency my neighbors and I felt for change was not reflected in our elected officials. That was true not just of the city’s response to homelessness, but also of their response to so many of the issues facing LA: rapidly rising housing costs, deaths from traffic violence, degradation of our environment and so much more. That’s when I decided to run for office.
Our campaign ended up inspiring over a thousand volunteers and winning the most votes in a Council race ever. I ran on a promise that you could set a big transformative agenda and deliver for neighborhoods. And because people believed in that promise, unsheltered homelessness decreased in our district for the first time in years. Tenants won the strongest package of new protections in forty years. Our air is cleaner, our streets safer, our local government more responsive. Our win changed what was possible in LA.
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