Lakshmi Sridaran
Lakshmi Sridaran currently serves as the Executive Director of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT). From 2014 to 2019, she was SAALT’s Director of National Policy and Advocacy where she led the organization’s external engagement and developed SAALT’s policy and legislative agenda, which primarily focuses on immigration, racial profiling, and combating hate violence. Prior to that she served as the Policy Director for The Praxis Project, a Washington D.C. based national movement support organization focused on health justice in communities of color. Before moving to D.C., Lakshmi completed six years of work in New Orleans, Louisiana immediately following Hurricane Katrina, working in Black-led organizations to help improve federal contracting opportunities for Black and women-owned businesses; institute participatory budgeting to expose inequitable distribution of federal recovery dollars; and preserve public schools and infrastructure from rapid privatization. Lakshmi is grounded in her early organizing experiences, which include fighting for living wages for campus workers; working to reverse Prop 209, which banned affirmative action in California; helping ensure land retention for Black farmers in her home state of Georgia; and conducting voter outreach in Haitian and Latinx communities in Miami leading up to the 2004 presidential election. Since 2009, Lakshmi has served on the Board of the Southern Initiative of the Algebra Project, originally founded in Mississippi in the 1980’s to use mathematics as an organizing tool to ensure quality education for every child. She holds a Masters degree in City Planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.A. in Ethnic Studies from The University of California, Berkeley.