Pooja Mehta

Omar Joseph

The South Asian Bar Association (SABA) Foundation of Washington, D.C. announced that Pooja Mehta and Omar Joseph are the recipients of the first annual SABA Foundation Fellowship. The SABA Foundation of Washington D.C. was founded to organize, support and promote public interest activities and projects for the benefit of the South Asian community and the metropolitan D.C. area, a release said.

The Foundation provides financial assistance in the form of summer fellowships to law students working at public interest agencies in the metropolitan D.C. area. The primary purpose of the fellowship is to fund a student’s internship with a public interest organization affecting the South Asian community in the D.C. area. “In the inaugural year, the scholarship will be $1,000 for each recipient,” SABA Foundation President Vivek Sankaran told News India-Times.

Mehta will complete her fellowship as a law clerk with the Children’s Law Center (CLC) of Washington, D.C., a non-profit organization that helps at-risk children in the District of Columbia secure safe, permanent homes and the education, health care, and social services they need to prosper. Joseph will complete his fellowship as a legal intern with the Tahirih Justice Center located in Falls Church, Virginia. His work will entail helping women who are victims of persecution seek asylum in the United States, the release said.

(Compiled from news dispatches by Ganesh S. Lakshman)