A Charity for Children of New York’s South Asian Working Class

NEW YORK–Like a number of charities in the United States, South Asian Youth Action (SAYA) seeks to help needy South Asian children, but not in some distant land like India — these youths are in its backyard in New York City.

According to the United States Census Bureau American Community Survey from 2010, more than 1 out of 20 youths (between the ages of five and 19) in New York City are South Asian, and a quarter of this population lives at or below the poverty level. In the New York borough of Queens, where SAYA is based, one out of eight youths is South Asian.

These are the children of the people wealthier New Yorkers cross paths with multiple times a day: taxi drivers, the deli and newsstand workers, the fruit and food cart vendors.Their children often attend overcrowded public schools, and the parents work long hours and may be unaware of the issues students face at school, like the pressure to join gangs or try drugs.

Founded in 1996 by Sayu Bhojwani, a Queens resident who saw a lack of resources for South Asian children in New York, SAYA offers more than a dozen sources of support. On the academic side, students can get tutoring and help with the college application process through the Chalo College program, which includes campus visits and information on financial aid and scholarships. For personal development, there is a leadership program for girls, a basketball program for boys and counseling for emotional issues.

The nonprofit organization has a presence in seven schools, which are all in Queens except for one in Brooklyn, and a gurdwara, a Sikh temple, but its main base is a community center in Elmhurst, a Queens neighborhood, where kids can come after school or on weekends to play basketball, get tutoring, do their homework, meet with counselors or simply hang out.

The majority of SAYA youth are of Guyanese, Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani descent, said Udai Tambar, SAYA’s executive director, and each of the organization’s sites reflects the ethnic subgroup that is largest in that neighborhood. SAYA offers ethnicity-specific counseling, and it bills itself as the nation’s only secular youth organization for South Asians.

“If you think of identity as a Venn diagram where the different circles represent the different parts of their identity, SAYA creates a safe space for youth to explore how these circles overlap,” Mr. Tambar said. “By being a secular space, we allow youth to explore what their religion and its overlap with other parts of their identity means for them.”

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