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A role model for Sikh girls in business, philanthropy

50th anniversary alumni spotlight: Raji Brar

By California State University, Bakersfield

September 8^th, 2020

Raji Brar was working as an administrative assistant at Clinica Sierra Vista when she got a call from her dad one day.

“Hey, do you want to open up a sandwich shop?” he asked her.

Rupinder Jhaj was proposing she develop a Subway franchise in Arvin, which had nothing like it. Brar looked around town, tracked down the landlord of a building she thought might work, and filled out the paperwork to become a Subway franchisee.

Subway headquarters wasn’t convinced that Hispanics ate sandwiches, but Brar persisted. “It’ll be really great!” she told the company.

And it was. The store broke local Subway opening sales records.

That is Raji Brar, say the people in her life. To her, you can accomplish anything you put your mind (and a little elbow grease) to.

And Brar has accomplished a lot.

She is not only chief operating officer of her family’s Countryside Market & Restaurants, but the first Sikh woman elected to a California city council and a onetime member of countless community boards.

Closest to Brar’s heart is a nonprofit she started with a friend that raises money for scholarships and addresses health and abuse issues facing the local Sikh community.

She and her family are completely self-made.

Brar is the oldest child of two Punjabi Sikhs from northern India who came to the United States with nothing in the mid-1970s and first raised their children in Central Valley farm labor camps.

Her father started their company with a single gas station at Seventh Standard Road and North Chester Avenue in Oildale, and with his current wife, Gurmit Jhaj, children and in-laws has grown it one more gas station and fast food franchise at a time. They employ more than 450 people in Kern County.

“Some families like to go camping. Some like to go to the beach,” Brar said, laughing. “We like to go to work.”

Coming to America

Brar’s parents are among the Punjabi Sikhs who immigrated to the United States after the British exit from India left the country in tatters.

Jhaj, who had an electrical degree, and Raji's mom, Surjit, who couldn’t read or write, were from an agricultural region of India and so fit in naturally with the small San Joaquin Valley farm communities where they settled and had their children.

A role model for Sikh girls in business, philanthropy

Together, they and extended family members lived in farm labor camps and rode to work in the back of pickup trucks. Brar’s parents proudly called the camps “company housing.”

“So I embraced it,” Brar said of the term. “We thought we were really fancy that my parents had ‘company housing.’”

Jhaj wanted something more and so moved the family from Kerman to Bakersfield just before Brar started seventh grade. He worked at the Johnny Cat kitty litter factory in Maricopa; Surjit cooked and announced orders at a Burger King in Bakersfield.

Brar attended Actis and Thompson junior highs, then West High School, where she played soccer, was elected junior and senior class secretary, and ran her younger brother Rick’s successful campaign for sophomore class president.

Brar counts herself lucky that her parents allowed her, a girl, to participate in sports and activities. It was motivating, she said.

“In my culture, that wasn’t common,” Brar said. “Girls didn’t get to do everything the boys got to do.”

Brar wears a Vote 4 Raji sticker on her backside — Brar was elected junior and senior class secretary at West High School.

Making more sense

It’s true: Indian parents want their children to become doctors. Brar always figured she’d become one, and so headed off to UC Riverside to study biology.

But she wasn't happy, and had to break the news to parents she knew would be disappointed. Brar moved home, took out student loans and enrolled at CSUB, working at McKinley Elementary School and convalescent hospital to pay bills.

She loved the intimacy, direct access to quality instructors and the ability to participate in research at CSUB.

“At UC Riverside I was stuck in these huge classes. In the labs, there were like 150 people being taught by a teacher’s aide,” Brar said. “Now I come to CSUB and I have maybe 15 or 20 kids in my class being taught by professors. And it was the same material."

She parlayed her 2000 biology degree into a job as a chemist, then earned a master’s in healthcare administration two years later and got the job as assistant to Clinica CEO Steve Schilling. Brar found it “amazing” to learn about the operations, funding and politics of federally qualified health centers.

But life had different plans for her.

At Brar’s master’s degree graduation ceremony (l to r): Mother-in-law, Mukhtiar Brar; father-in-law, Major Brar; Brar; Brar’s husband, Dan; brother-in-law, Kulwant Brar; and nephew Harshaan Brar.

Taking care of business

It was around this time that Jhaj suggested his daughter open a Subway in Arvin. He had worked as a mail carrier for several years, sold real estate on the side and invested in an Oildale gas station.

Brar rounded up friends and family to help her do the demolition work for that first Subway and rewarded them with tacos and beer. Then she got “the world’s cheapest contractor” and spent $20,000 getting the restaurant built.

Brar went on to run the place, learning as she went.

“It’s an education in and of itself, because you have to be the janitor, the accountant, HR, the marketer, everything,” she said.

Brar, second from left, with some of the employees who helped open her first Subway in 2003. Lorena Granados, at Brar’s left, still works for her.

Brar: “We took forever to rip out the tile only to find out the contractor could have laid the tile over the old ones!”

What she really excelled at was managing people, Rick Jhaj, her brother, said. It’s what has become her niche at Countryside.

“Everyone (in the family) brings something unique to the table, and Raji is really good with people,” said Rick, who specializes in construction. “She’s a good leader. She knows how to motivate people. Even growing up, people would come to her with their problems.”

Countryside Market & Restaurants has now grown to include nine gas stations, seven Taco Bells, 10 Subways, a construction company and a retail developer. It’s also gotten into the car wash business in Taft.

Brar’s dad leads the company; running it with him are Brar’s stepmother, brother, husband, sister-in-laws and stepbrother. It’s truly a team effort, Brar said, not just referring to family.

“My dad makes sure we understand that the reason we are successful is because every person has brought value to this,” Brar said. “And that includes everyone, including the people who are representing us on the cash register and the folks cooking in the back.”

Brar family members celebrate the grand opening of Countryside at Countryside Village. Front (l to r): Surjit Jhaj, Neetu Jhaj, Raji Brar, Imanni Brar, Gurmit Jhaj and Rupinder Jhaj. Back: Rick Jhaj, Nimi Brar and Dan Brar.

A political groundbreaker

Brar got to know the people of Arvin well while running that first Subway, and they convinced her to run for the City Council. She served from November 2006 to June 2008 before giving it up for family reasons; she became pregnant with her second son.

Brar’s tenure was brief, but groundbreaking. She was the first Sikh woman elected to a city council in California.

She learned on the council that Arvin had the worst ozone pollution in the country, and so fought her way onto the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District board. Brar was one of only a few air board members who opposed two major pollution cleanup proposals because they believed those plans took too long to address dirty air concerns, according to The Bakersfield Californian.

“She was very good in that position,” said former state Sen. Dean Florez, D-Shafter, now a PR consultant and member of the California Air Resources Board. “The small cities finally got a voice, there weren’t just the voices of Bakersfield or Fresno.”

Family and friends celebrate Brar’s swearing-in as an Arvin councilmember.

Brar has served on numerous other boards including the local Girl Scouts of Central California, Kern County Fair, Kern Health Systems and Kern Medical.

On the fair board she was on the winning side of an effort to ban elephant rides after seeing videos of the animals being mistreated. As an Indian-American, Brar was in a unique position to weigh in on the contentious issue.

“Nobody back home would look at an elephant and say, ‘Let’s go tame and ride it,’” she said.

Brar left the fair board to join the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board. She’s also a member of the CSUB Foundation board, which advises the fundraising arm of the university.

‘What are we doing?’

Five years ago, Brar and her friend Mona Gill were filled with pride watching the first Sikh float participate in the Rose Parade. It reminded them of all the hard work their parents put into getting to America and building a better life for their families here.

“What are we doing?” Brar and Gill asked each other.

The result was the Bakersfield Sikh Women’s Association. It started out raising $5,000 in scholarship money awarded to then-Ridgeview High senior Taranpreet Kaur, the daughter of a truck driver and factory worker whose family moved here from India when she was 12.

The money helped Kaur pay for her first year at UC Irvine but more importantly, boosted her parents’ confidence that she could and should go away to college, something many Sikh parents are hesitant to see their children do, she said.

“It really pushed them to believe in me and to let me follow my dreams to pursue college where I wanted to go,” said Kaur, now a 23-year-old IT consultant for a mortgage company living in Sherman Oaks.

Taranpreet Kaur, fifth from left, poses with her mom and members of the Sikh Women’s Association: Parveen Gill; Harpreet Muhar; Shaleen Gill; Brar; Kaur and her mom; Mona Gill; Andeep Dhindsa; Neetu Jhaj; Gurmit Gill; and Sandeep Jassar.

To date, the Sikh Women’s Association has awarded $150,000 to students of all backgrounds.

The association has also teamed up with Adventist Health and Kaiser Permanente to organize breast and cervical cancer screenings for Sikh women at a local gurudwaras. Brar wasn’t sure at first how many would show up given the taboo nature of what they were proposing to do.

“Well, they showed up, and you wouldn’t believe how many questions older grandmas had for us,” Brar said. “They were the least shy, and they wanted to talk about everything.”

One thing the association has been encouraging Sikhs to talk about lately is physical, sexual and substance abuse in their community. The association felt compelled to act after the intentional drowning of a newborn born to a 15-year-old Bakersfield Sikh girl in early 2019.

The teen’s mother admitted killing the baby out of shame; her father committed suicide, according to The Californian.

The Sikh Women’s Association organized a community discussion of abuse at the Guru Angad Darbar Sikh Gurdwara temple.

“I was shocked to my core that we were actually having this dialogue, which was so needed,” Brar said. “We talked about patriarchy and we talked about shame, which is so big in our community.”

When, a few months later, a Bakersfield Sikh man admitted fatally shooting his daughter-in-law for dishonoring his family, Brar and her friends started a crisis hotline that receives three to four calls per week.

“As you get more people, you have more things happen,” Gill said of the growing Sikh community in Bakersfield. “We want to be able to lend support where we can, and condemn things when they need to be condemned.”

Brar and her mother, Surjit Jhaj, pose in front of a billboard celebrating women leaders.

Brar met her husband, Babu, when she was 18 and working in her father’s first Oildale gas station. She jokes that she’s grateful he’s not bothered by her “outgrowing, aggressive” ways.

On the contrary, Babu said: “She’s my rock star.”

The Brars were married in front of 1,100 people at the former Rio Bravo Resort in March 2001 and have three children: sons Davin, 15, and Dylan, 12; and daughter, Imanni , 12. Imanni was born to one of Raji’s cousins; the Brars’ adoption of her became final in May.

The Brars: Davin, Imanni, Raji, Dan and Dylan.

Each of their kids is very different, Babu says, and Raji is especially adept at tailoring her parenting style to each one. She’s also very diligent about getting her work and community service business done by 3 or 4, then turning her full attention to her family, he said.

Brar’s husband and brother agreed that Brar does all she does to be a good role model for her kids. They aren’t growing up with the same hardships earlier generations of their family did, Babu and Rick said, and she wants to make sure they understand the importance of supporting communities that need it.