Rachna Choudhry is co-founder of POPVOX.com. After ten years of advocacy and lobbying for several national non-profit organizations, she realized that there is a huge disconnect between people and our lawmakers in Washington. Frustrated from not feeling heard, people bang the drum louder — or simply give up on the policy-making process entirely. In 2010, Rachna met her co-founder, a Congressional staffer who understood the frustrations of lawmakers who were getting bombarded by generic petitions to Congress or impersonal form letters — and the idea for POPVOX was born.

Rachna holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from UCLA, and a Master’s in Public Policy from Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. She is based in Washington, DC and hails from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Since launching in 2011, POPVOX won the social media category at South by Southwest, was ranked #10 on Mashable’s Major Tech Contributions From Entrepreneurial Women and was honored at the 2012 Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards. POPVOX has helped close to 400,000 verified constituents share their personal stories and experiences with their lawmakers in Washington. In 2014, Rachna ranked #6 in Digital Citizenship Project’s Digital Citizens of the Year.

In June 2014, the Library of Congress selected POPVOX for inclusion in the official digital archives of the United States. Now, every letter written by individuals to their Members of Congress are preserved as part of our nation’s historical record