Shivani Parikh was born in Queens to Gujarati immigrants and grew up in Rockland County, NY. After graduating from Cornell University, she worked at The Center for Safety & Change and volunteered with various Asian American organizations including MannMukti, South Asian Youth Action, and the National Asian Pacific American Women Forum’s New York City chapter. During her gap years, she was accepted to the Women of Color Network, Inc.'s Economic Policy & Leadership 2020 Mentorship Lab, Just Media’s inaugural fellowship cohort, the Supermajority Education Fund’s Majority Leaders 2021 program, bluelight academy's inaugural Transformative Justice summer class through the New York State Coalition Against Sexual Assault (NYSCASA) and the Bay Area Solidarity Summer training program.

At Fordham Law School, she was a Stein Scholar for Public Interest Law and Ethics, a Realizing Excellence and Access in the Law (REAL) Scholar, and Crowley Scholar within the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice. She served as President and subsequently the chairwoman of the Board of Advisors for the North American South Asian Law Students Association (NASALSA).

She is a recipient of the Ms. JD Public Interest Scholarship, a winner of the South Asian Bar Association of New York’s Public Interest Fellowship, a Clinton Global Initiative University selected commitment maker, a graduate of Sakhi for South Asian Women's Summer Young Leaders Program, an alumna of Indian American Impact’s Desis Lead Political Mentorship Program, and an alumna of The Action Lab (TAL), Yale Law School's Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project, and NYU Law's Initiative for Community Power Inaugural Summer Academy on Law, Organizing, and Power Building. She currently serves at the Youth Lead of the Legal & Governance Committee of South Asians for America.

Inspired by civil rights and racial justice advocates Fatima Meer and Jayaben Desai, she is committed to building the South Asian LDF to respond to the legal needs of our Desi families and communities.

Areeb Been Khan is a Bangladeshi-American attorney from Virginia. An early interest in politics and government led him to stints at the U.S. House of Representatives, the Obama State Department in the Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization for the Middle East and North Africa, organizing county operations in Virginia for a General Election, and eventually to law school. An alum of the University of Virginia and Brooklyn Law School, Areeb seeks to combine community lawyering with political tools to expand, defend, and advocate for the rights of South Asian Americans.

Areeb is an avid fan of Chelsea football club, basketball, and Clipse, and his interests outside of work often lead him down Islamic history rabbit holes and discussions regarding human rights. You can find him at a museum, a local protest, or eating at a neighborhood spot in Fort Greene.

Dhruv Kumar was born in Ottawa, Canada, and grew up in a South Asian immigrant household in San Jose, California. His father’s heritage is rooted in Varanasi, India, while his mother’s family are former partition refugees from Peshawar, present-day Pakistan. He graduated from Cornell University in 2019 before working as a management consultant at Oliver Wyman in New York City, specializing in financial services. Dhruv graduated from the New York University School of Law in 2023. A major part of his NYU Law career was working as a student advocate for the Family Defense Clinic, in partnership with Brooklyn Defender Services to represent indigent parents in family regulation proceedings. Apart from being a staunch advocate for criminal justice reform, Dhruv attributes his passion for South Asian causes in the United States to attending the Bay Area Solidarity Summer’s first training program while in high school.

Omkar Mahajan was born in Missouri and grew up in the Bay Area, California. His parents were immigrants from Mumbai, Maharashtra. Omkar graduated from the University of California, San Diego in 2017 and later enrolled at Cornell Law School graduating in 2021. During his time at Cornell, Omkar was the Executive Editor of the Cornell International Law Journal and served on the executive boards of the South Asian Law Students Association, the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, and the American Constitution Society. Additionally, he interned at a nonprofit where he helped immigrants from Asian communities obtain justice in asylum proceedings. He also served in his law school’s Estate Planning Practicum Clinic where he helped low-income clients with their estate planning needs. Omkar is interested in South Asian issues and is committed to helping advocate for the rights of South Asians. Currently, he is working as a private equity lawyer at a large law firm. In his spare time, Omkar likes to read history books and play chess.

Zehra Jafri was born in Long Island, New York, and is a first-generation attorney. The countries and states she grew up in include Pakistan (Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Kashmir), New Hampshire (Nashua), New York (Queens, the Bronx, Long Island), Washington (Woodinville, Bellevue, Seattle), Massachusetts (Lexington, Holliston) and she has attended more than 10 different schools in her life. While in law school at UC Law San Francisco, Zehra received the Innovation Law Clinics Merit Scholarship, Blum Scholarship, Dean's Scholarship, Allen D. Wilson Memorial scholarship, and was the founding CEO of a startup where she created a technology to help mobilize unhoused individuals, and was a finalist receiving funding for her pitch at the UC-Wide Big Ideas Venture Competition in 2021, at UC Berkeley. Her law review article at the intersection of the partition and intellectual property law is pending publication at UCLA School of Law’s Pacific Basin Law Journal: One Sari Three Different Ways to Drape it.

Zehra was also the Vice President of the South Asian Law Students Association at her law school and president of the Muslim Law Students Association and is a mentor for SABA. Aside from her IP Litigation Practice she has an active pro bono practice where she counsels on asylum, domestic violence, and immigration matters for children and women including special immigrant juvenile status. Most recently, she was part of the Afghan Refugee clinic, a joint effort with Amazon, where she both translated from Urdu with the clients and completed the legal paperwork. She is thankful for the opportunity to advocate for her community.

Anika Maan was born in California and grew up in a Sikh household in the DC area. At Washington and Lee University School of Law, she is the Managing Editor of the German Law Journal and founded the Middle Eastern and South Asian Law Students Association (MESALSA). Anika is a Senior Fellow at the Raphaël Lemkin Genocide Prevention Program, where her work has previously been on Myanmar post-the Saffron Revolution, and currently focuses on the influence of international human rights norms on domestic legal systems. Her latest piece, on the categorization of the Sikh Genocide under international law and the forgotten case studies of women in the region, is awaiting publication.

Anika works in financial crimes, treaty compliance, and legal systems in the international development space. She has previously worked in U.S. securities and government compliance as well as with the United Nations in the Asia-Pacific region. She served on the board of the National South Asian Law Students Association (NASALSA) as the Content and Communications Director from 2021-2023 and currently serves on the NASALSA Board of Advisors.

Anika is passionate about hiking mountains, collecting South Asian art and instruments, and finding the best restaurants around. She spends all her free time exploring new places.