Meet Chander

It all started when…

Chander Jayaraman came to America at the age of 10, when his parents moved with their three sons from Bangalore, India to Kansas City, KS. Like many first generation Americans, Chander felt the call to “give back” to his newly adopted country from a young age.

In 1995, at the age of 25, he came to DC to work on Capitol Hill, where he found that partisan politics had no appeal to him. Within months, he landed a job as a youth development specialist at the Latin American Youth Center (LAYC), and went on to direct their YouthBuild program connecting young people to marketable skills and good jobs. He later worked for a nonprofit that focused on helping people with disabilities, and joined the board of the Jobs Coalition, which brings together members of the faith community and the building trades to help train and prepare young people and returning citizens for lasting and meaningful employment.

In 2010, he started his own company specializing in emergency preparedness planning, and in 2012, he was elected to the Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) for his Capitol Hill neighborhood. He has chaired the ANC (ANC6B), located in a deeply historic residential neighborhood that is also among the most rapidly growing in the city, for two out of the past four years.

He currently lives on Capitol Hill with his wife, Suzanne, and their 15-year-old son, Kol.