South Asians for Obama in a new avatar

South Asians for Obama, the most successful South Asian grassroots organisation that campaigned for then presidential candidate Barack Obama, has now transitioned to South Asians for Opportunity (SAFO).

Hrishi Karthikeyan, who co-founded SAFO with Devendra 'Dave' Kumar, told rediff.com: "We like the SAFO name, but since the initial objective was to win the election on behalf of Obama and that was achieved, we wanted to keep the organisation around to continue to build others types of positive change."

"So, now, under South Asians for Opportunity, we are focused on more grass-roots community building, finding candidates further down the ticket that we could support, ad really continuing to get out people and be active in the field registering voters, talking to people about the issues, doing more grass-roots fund-raising, that we were pretty effective during the campaign," he said.

Karthikeyan said, "It is an ongoing process to establish an organisation for the long-term, but we thought that just because the election was over, we didn't want the work that we had done to just stop indefinitely."

He acknowledged that in the wake of the political tsunami that had rocked the Democrats in Massachusetts, where the party lost the seat held by the late US Senator for nearly four decades and the earlier gubernatorial losses in Virginia and New Jersey to the Republicans, makes SAFO's work cut out for it, particularly since the majority of independents who constituted the base of Obama's support had apparently dissipated in large numbers.

He said, "It's still working for positive change, but doing it in a way that we didn't think it should just happen every four years. We wanted to kind of shift the focus so that we could continue to expand opportunities for people of our community, but also the country at large."

"And, the best way, we can do that now is to continue the kind of grass-roots coalition building that we had been doing that we started during the campaign," he added.

He said that as was South Asians for Obama, South Asians for Opportunity, was neither a non-profit organization, nor would it evolve into a political action committee.

Karthikeyan acknowledged that in some ways it would be a sort of lobbying organisation, "but in a grassroots way. Not in the way of a traditional lobbying group, but exclusively in a grassroots way."