Our Bureau
Los Angeles, CA
Nithya Raman was born in Kerala, India, and moved to Louisiana when she was six before her family settled in Massachusetts. After graduating from Harvard and training in urban planning at MIT, she worked in Delhi and Chennai taking on extreme poverty, fighting for basic necessities like water, plumbing, and shelter.
As she moved to Los Angeles, an incredible, beautiful, diverse city that became the first place that really felt like home to her, she got married and started a family. While making their home, she observed and felt a crisis growing around them, with more and more people falling into homelessness every year and more tents on the city’s streets. She co-founded a volunteer group with her friends to try and help people experiencing homelessness in her neighborhood. The group SELAH grew quickly, driven by a sense of urgency for change.
Her sense of change prompted her to contest the LA city council and she was elected to the city council in November 2020, becoming the first Asian-American woman and the first South Asian ever to serve on the City Council.
Her belief and conviction in helping homeless people, protecting tenants from rising rent and eviction, and shifting the duties of traffic enforcement and non-violent mental health crisis to unarmed personnel rather than Police have been transformational.
Recently, the Los Angeles Times endorsed Nithya Raman to secure a second term on the City Council, considering her good work and positive contributions since her initial election in November 2020. She was commended by the newspaper for her impressive performance against the backdrop of her being a relative newcomer to the city council.
