Who is SEVA?

SEVA Immigrant Community Advocacy Project
1(800) FOR-SEVA

Who is SEVA?

SEVA was created in 2006 when a handful of young Richmond Hill based professionals joined forces to help residents as a collective, in order to effectuate greater change in Queens immigrant communities. Since the members are part of the immigrant community that SEVA is striving to build, SEVA is painfully aware of the social, economic, and political obstacles that immigrants deal with on a day to day basis.

SEVA works to build power for indigenous clusters of communities throughout New York City, beginning with South Asian, and South Asian diasporic communities in Richmond Hill and other local Queens immigrant communities.

SEVA seeks to work with each community's system of existing social infrastructure, such as temples, mosques and churhes, in order to preserve the natural structure of trust and culture that flourishes around the community's self-made indigenous community system.

The role of local religious institutions in New York City's immigrant social infrastructure has been recognized increasingly, by social commentators who have realized that:

"If you want to work in the South Bronx or Chinatown, religion is a powerful social force that you have to understand . . . as we educated grass-roots religious leaders about social issues, we realized that the secular activists we brought in didn't realize the importance of these leaders. That's when we thought religious communities could become a resource to educate different groups."

The late Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., working with the SCLC had also defined their critical organizing efforts around the collective identity of African Americans in the 1960's as church-goers:

"(The SCLC is) church-orientated because of the very structure of the Negro community in the South."