Jahnavi Rao
About Jahnavi Rao
I am the President and Founder of New Voters and have dedicated the past 7 years to amplifying the voices of high school students as leaders, voters and researchers in the civic space. I graduated from Harvard in 2023, concentrating in Government with a secondary in Music. In my junior year of high school, I founded the 501(c)3 nonpartisan organization, New Voters, which empowers student leaders to run successful registration drives at their high school through our near-peer mentorship program. We have civically activated 80,000 high school students to vote across our 300+ high school chapters in 39 states across the country. Now, our team of 40+ full and part-time college and high school students is working to register 40,000 students to vote by the 2024 election. I believe youth voter participation is critical to ensuring the government’s priorities reflects the interests of those who will inherit it. I took a leave of absence in the fall of 2020 to scale New Voters to have the capacity to manage more interns, train more schools and register more students. I also took a leave of absence in the fall of 2022 to intern at the White House in the Office of Public Engagement, where I continued work on engaging young people. I am also passionate about music and vocal performance, having studied Indian Classical and then Western (Operatic) vocal performance from the age of 6. I am a nationally ranked singer (NAfME & PMEA) and have performed in professional operatic productions in Italy and at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia (International Opera Theater). I have portrayed the roles of Pamina (Die Zauberflöte) and Susanna (Le Nozze di Figaro) in Harvard College Opera productions.