LENDING HIS VOICE

PHILADELPHIA-BASED PUBLIC INTEREST LAWYER, AND EDUCATOR COMMUNITY ORGANISER NEIL MAKHIJA SPEAKS TO TINA THAKRAR ABOUT ADVOCATING FOR COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT IN LAW, POLITICS AND PUBLIC POLICY THROUGH SMALL STEPS THAT MAKE A BIG IMPACT

- TINA THAKRAR

Sometime in the 1980s, Kailash and Lata Makhija, the children of refugees of India's partition, immigrated to Carbon County, Pennsylvania, leaving behind their home in the refugee city of Ulhasnagar, Maharashtra. Through sheer hard work, they built a life in the US with their three children, striving to give them the childhood and life they had missed out on. Today, four decades later, their son Neil Makhija, has made it his life's mission to lend a resounding voice to others like his father, to give the growing community of Indians and South Asians in the US the power and recognition it deserves.

A Philadelphia-based public interest attorney and community activist, Neil is the Executive Director of Indian American Impact - a leading South Asian civic organisation in the US, a lecturer in law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, and also currently serves as President of the South Asian Bar Association of Philadelphia. Once an aspiring neuroscientist at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, Neil was simply following his lifelong dream, when he saw an election in 2008 that proved that when enough voices banded together, dramatic change was possible.