Dear SABA North America Foundation Community,
Foundation was created to bring together SABA North America’s membership in the spirit of philanthropy and service, to help the most vulnerable within the South Asian diaspora. As the incoming President, I am honored to take the mantle from so many dedicated leaders who came before me, and especially owe a great debt to our immediate past President, Sucharita Varanasi. I’m writing to highlight some of our priorities for the upcoming year and begin a dialogue with the Foundation community.
This year’s Executive Committee, Sa’adiyah Masoud (President-Elect), Ritu Singh (Treasurer), Namita Mani (Secretary) and me, has big plans for the upcoming year. For years, Foundation focused on collecting donations to make grants to community-based organizations (“CBO”) in the areas of domestic abuse, civil rights, and immigration rights. While there is great value in grant-making, the South Asian legal community can provide so much more to CBOs. Over the last year, we have expanded our activities to include valuable training through our Learning Lab series and networking and outreach through our Grantee Roundtables. Feedback from these events has been extremely positive, so for this year, we’re looking to expand our outreach and programming.
The Learning Lab series provides the entire community with updates and training on important issues for the South Asian diaspora. And our grantee community told us that theGrantee Roundtables provided a unique opportunity for them to learn from each other and discuss challenges and opportunities with similar organizations around the country. We want to further build out those initiatives so that they are self-sustaining, with a regular cadence, and with content that our community needs and wants. Be on the lookout for events starting in October and continuing through until the SABA North America Annual Conference next year. If you have any ideas for programming that may be of interest to your CBO, or if you have domain expertise in the areas we serve, we want to hear from you.
In the last two years, Foundation has also worked to meet the challenges posed by COVID-19. At the height of the initial pandemic response in 2020, the CBO community saw a calamitous drop in funding when their clients were most in need. Meeting that challenge, we made additional COVID-19 grants in 2020 to help fill funding gaps and support increased activity by our grantees. In 2021, along with SABA North America and SABA chapters, weraised approximately $115,000 to aid relief efforts in India. In the coming year, Foundation, with your support, will continue to identify and address emergent needs in the South Asian community across our continent.
Of course, as an all-volunteer organization, we face challenges of our own. We are working hard behind the scenes to improve our processes and systems so that we can focus on our programmatic and grant-making goals. Over the next year, you may notice new initiatives and processes designed to focus us on helping CBOs in their missions.
Thank you for your support of Foundation and those most vulnerable in the diaspora. I’m excited about the next year and humbled by the work our grantees and their peer organizations do for South Asians in the US and Canada.
Any questions, please email me at president@sabalegalfdn.org.
In solidarity,
Chintan Amin
President
SABA North America Foundation