about veekas

politics

Veekas grew up in Tempe, Arizona, and went to McClintock High School. He found politics early. As an Arizona State University student he worked as a page in the state Senate, and in 2010 he wrote a column for the campus paper urging classmates to vote for legislators who would protect the university’s funding. Of the Senate’s hallways, he wrote: “I don’t recall seeing a single student.”

In 2012 he was deputy finance director for David Schapira’s congressional campaign, and the Flinn Foundation named him to the fall class of the Flinn-Brown Civic Leadership Academy, which prepares Arizonans for state-level civic leadership. That October he spoke on an Arizona Town Hall panel about civic leadership for Arizona’s future. He was also a fellow with People For the American Way.

He walked at ASU’s commencement in 2014, one course short of the political science degree he finished in 2018. That fall, at 23, he ran for the governing board of the Tempe Union High School District, where he had gone to high school. He campaigned on smaller classes, more teachers and more technology in classrooms, and the board’s president publicly backed him. “I want to see the students who I identify with so much, because I was one of them,” he told The State Press. “I want to see those students be equipped to be successful.” His campaign website was veekasmeansprogress.com, the address this site still uses.

He came third of five for two seats, 315 votes short. In 2016 he ran for the Tempe Elementary School District board and came up short again. In between, in 2015, he co-chaired Yes Support Our Schools, the volunteer campaign for the Tempe Union district’s budget override. With no hired hands, more than 100 volunteers put up 700 signs, knocked on 8,000 doors and made 8,000 phone calls, The Arizona Republic reported. “I think the overrides that win are the ones that have a lot of community support,” he said. Voters approved it, though he wasn’t happy that local taxpayers had to make up for the legislature cutting the district’s capital budget by 80 percent since 2008. In 2017 Teen Vogue asked him how to run for a local school board: start early, be confident, surround yourself with good people, and put in the work. In 2017 he was also director of business and community partnership at the Arizona Technology Council Foundation. He did all of this as Veekas Shrivastava, the name you’ll find in the Arizona coverage and on Ballotpedia’s record of his races.

activism

After moving to New York, Veekas joined Sunrise Movement NYC, the city hub of the national youth climate movement, in 2019. He led the hub in 2020 and 2021. In 2021 its members pressed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to back a Civilian Climate Corps that would put young people to work fighting climate change. When Schumer committed to one that July, Veekas said, in a statement Common Dreams quoted: “Schumer’s commitment means our organizing is working. Now, we work to ensure he follows through on his promises.” The next spring he told TIME that Schumer had made a Civilian Climate Corps a major element of Build Back Better. From 2021 into 2022 he led the hub’s Good Jobs for All campaign for a Green New Deal jobs guarantee, and talked it through on the hub’s podcast.

On an October morning in 2021, as Congress fought over the climate funding in Build Back Better, Sunrise NYC joined other groups in blocking the FDR Drive and the West Side Highway at rush hour, and dozens of protesters were arrested. amNewYork quoted the hub’s spokesperson, Veekas: “We regret that we had to delay commuters’ workdays this morning. … Our disruption of traffic on two major highways is only temporary, unlike the destruction climate-related disasters will wreak upon our city without bold and urgent climate action.”

He tries to talk about climate without making anyone feel guilty. “What we believe, and what I believe, is that individual lifestyle stuff is secondary at best to collective action to create systemic change,” he told The New Republic in 2021, for a story about talking climate with family over the holidays. His advice was to go into those conversations “remembering that these are people I love.”

For Earth Day 2022 he was one of the Sunrise NYC members who biked 253 miles from Manhattan to Albany for Climate Can’t Wait, a coalition’s package of 12 state climate bills, to a rally of about 1,000 people at the Capitol. Before they set out, he and three other riders talked about why on Hudson Mohawk Magazine. New York’s 2019 climate law, he told Spectrum News, “was always supposed to be only half of the equation”; the other half was the regulation and funding to deliver on it. That October, Citizen Action of New York named him one of its Everyday Heroes, for work to build a just and equitable New York.

In Beacon, his activism has gone beyond climate. In early 2024 he was among the residents who asked the City Council to pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Anything less, he told the council, “will be read by your community as an implicit support of continued violence at home and abroad.”

climate

In 2022 Veekas co-founded Beacon Climate Action Now, or BCAN, with other Beacon residents who wanted to make a difference close to home. Its members, he said, had two goals: “to enact climate-change policy and to take care of each other.” Within months it had 50 members.

BCAN chose short, winnable campaigns. The first was to stop new buildings in Beacon from burning gas or oil. Two council members announced the idea at a BCAN rally on the riverfront that October, and BCAN members went door to door with a petition, telling neighbors that going electric means lower utility bills and cleaner air. On March 20, 2023, after Veekas spoke at a rally in Polhill Park, the City Council voted unanimously to require all-electric construction for new buildings and major renovations from 2024. Beacon became the first city in the Hudson Valley to ban fossil fuels in new construction, and the third place in New York to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new buildings, after New York City and Ithaca. Before the vote, Council Member George Mansfield thanked BCAN and Food & Water Watch for pushing the council to act.

“We made that change,” he said, “by talking to our neighbors.” He made the case in practical terms: buildings are “almost a third of all of our state’s emissions,” he told Spectrum News, and the pollutants from burning fossil fuels at home cause childhood asthma. That fall he walked other Hudson Valley groups through the campaign in a webinar, “Lessons From Beacon.”

BCAN’s idea of climate work was broad. In 2023, when New York City sent asylum seekers to hotels in the Town of Newburgh, BCAN collected clothes, shoes and toiletries for them, two barbers offered free haircuts, and French-speaking neighbors volunteered to translate. “Beacon is doing our part,” Veekas told The Highlands Current. On Radio Kingston he pointed to a World Bank projection that climate change could displace 200 million people by 2050, and made the case for welcoming them: “When we give enthusiastically, we lose nothing; we gain a community of neighbors who will take care of us in return, and that makes us all safer.”

In 2024 he spoke at the Kingston press conference where Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha and State Senator Michelle Hinchey introduced a bill to replace the utility Central Hudson with a public Hudson Valley Power Authority. “It’s time for the people to take back our power from the corporate profiteers,” he said.

Since 2024 he has been on the board of the HELP Fund, and he chairs its fundraising committee. The fund launched in Kingston in September 2025, with a $500,000 loan loss reserve from NYSERDA, and is raising $5 million in community investment notes to make 2% loans of up to $15,000 to low- and moderate-income households for home energy upgrades (as of November 2026).

software

Veekas trained as a software engineer at Fullstack Academy in New York and has shipped web products since 2018. He spent four years at The Knot, first on the wedding marketplace couples use to find and book vendors, then on tools for the company’s own engineers: he co-led its shared component library and built an internal A/B testing service. In 2018 he gave three talks at the ReactNYC meetup, including one on virtual reality on the web with React 360, and he has contributed to open-source projects including React, Signal Desktop, Sequelize and MDN’s interactive examples.

His code and his organizing often point the same way. After a year on Arcadia’s frontend infrastructure team, he spent two years at Rewiring America helping households see what going electric would cost and save. He built the first frontend for its Personal Electrification Planner, co-managed the open-source Incentives API and savings calculator, and, as technical lead for new states’ data, shipped the launches of DC, Virginia, Arizona, Maine and Georgia in 2024, working with state agencies, utilities and volunteer groups to keep the data accurate.

Since 2026 he has been a senior product engineer at SolarAPP+, a nonprofit platform that makes solar permitting simpler for local governments and installers. More than 350 jurisdictions use it, and it has issued more than 150,000 permits (as of November 2026). He also builds Virtual Inspection, an AI-enabled tool, now in pilot, that lets California cities inspect home solar and battery installations remotely, from GPS-located, time-stamped photos and video the installer captures on site, with an inspector making the final call. He has also built AI chatbots and agentic workflows as a contractor. Roles and dates are on his work page.

allo

Allo began at home. When Veekas’s son was almost two and barely talking, the advice was to wait and see. The family didn’t wait, and speech therapy started, but at 30 minutes a week it left Veekas wondering what to do with the rest of the week. He taught himself what he could from books, and in 2025 his notes became Allo: speech and language support for parents of late-talking toddlers.

Allo offers a free communication check for children 6 months up to age 3, suggests activities built around routines a family already has, like a bedtime book, and shows what has changed over time. It doesn’t diagnose, and it doesn’t replace a speech therapist.

Read why Veekas built Allo →

in beacon

Veekas lives in Beacon with his young son. Since 2025 he has volunteered as an EMT with the Beacon Volunteer Ambulance Corps, which has cared for neighbors in Beacon and nearby towns since 1959 and was dispatched to 3,635 emergency calls in 2025. And the oak on this site’s home page has two old friends asleep at its foot: Truman, goofy and sweet, who loved long walks, and Ellie, a dog’s dog, who loved food and scratches.

Want to talk? Find a time to meet or send an email.