“Being a parent and imagining the conditions and the poverty that many of the children are living with in the world, it seems insane to not do everything you can to support initiatives like this,” said Sienna Miller at last night’s launch of UNICEF’s Project Lion. The campaign serves to protect and improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of children in India and is the brainchild of Miller’s friends Purvi and Harsh Padia. Joining the English actress—who was dressed in a sleek slip dress designed by her sister, Savannah—was her mother, Josephine, and her cohost, Today anchor and former First Daughter Jenna Bush Hager.

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Raised in the United States, UNICEF USA New York board member Purvi Padia made many childhood trips to visit family in India. The poverty she saw there made a deep and lasting impression on her. Even when she was small, she was determined to find ways to help. Now a mother herself, she’s working with UNICEF to improve the lives of children growing up in residential care institutions in India, and teaching her own children the importance of giving back to those less fortunate.

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Interior designer Purvi Padia has a lot to celebrate. This year marks her eponymous firm’s 10-year anniversary, and she has recently taken a successful leap into humanitarian work with Project Lion.

As a first generation Indian-American, Padia recognized that she had access to opportunities unavailable to many, especially in her parents’ country of origin. “Everything that I’ve done in life has been informed by this first generation hard-working mentality, never forgetting what my roots are and where I come from,” says Padia.

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When interior designer Purvi Padia, a first-generation Indian-American, visited her family in India when she was 7, she was struck by the poverty throughout the country, particularly among its youth. That memory never faded, and decades later, Padia and her husband, Harsh Padia, launched Project Lion in partnership with UNICEF to help the 1.5 million displaced children in India.

The charitable initiative launched this past May, and was inspired by the movie Lion, which portrays the suffering and marginalization of the displaced children in India. “Humanitarian work is a major passion, but my real work is interior design, so I wanted to figure out a way to bring the two together,” Padia tells Business of Home. “I wanted to create a piece that could be based in Indian values and design where the proceeds would go to Project Lion.”

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“When you become a mother, you really see firsthand how vulnerable and innocent children are, and it’s impossible not to see the gravity of the fact that so many children around the world have no support system. I think about how much my children need me and need a community of love and strength and guidance to have a shot at life. So many children in developing countries don’t even have a sliver of that. So I started Project Lion.

In its first three years, Project Lion and UNICEF India will serve 200,000 Indian orphans to ensure they have legal paperwork, adequate nutrition, basic healthcare and access to education. It will also work to get children out of institutionalized care and into longterm family care, and will create alternative models for nontraditional family care with a child-centered approach. I consider myself so fortunate to be in a position to make a real difference in the future of India’s most vulnerable children and to empower them to rewrite their futures.”

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