The Story of Me...
Who am I, you ask?
I grew up in India in a middle-class family to professional parents. For the first ten years of my life, we lived a very simple and basic life. My parents worked hard and yet struggled financially. There were months when they wondered if they should pay our school fee or the electricity bills. And there were days when they could only afford to feed us milk and fruits for dinner. Yet, they never complained. And hence, we didn't complain. We didn't know any better. We didn't know what we were missing.
My grandmother sewed my dresses and my mom embroidered them. Before silk hair ties were a thing, my grandmother was making them for me to match my dresses. In that sense, I grew up with the luxury of owning hand made, with love and care, clothes from a young age.
Our life started to change in the 1990's as my parents started doing better financially. My father returned to his profession of a merchant mariner and we started traveling the world with him. We stayed on cargo ships and traveled to the remotest part of the world. By the age of 11 I was an expert at bartering with the remote tribes in Indonesian islands, and by age 15 I had been to 6 of the 7 continents, and crossed both the Suez and Panama Canals twice.
At the age of 19, I moved to the US to study Economics and soon made Chicago my home. I lived in the US for 19 years and moved to Canada after that. While living in the US, I embodied the spirit of a white woman to fit in. When I moved to Canada, the integration with brown and black folks made me realize that I spoke White in a brown body. Which meant, I needed to be on a path to unlearn, relearn, and decolonize my own mindset. I created a fellowship for myself and read books, talked to people, took online courses, and studied what power and privilege meant. I started embedding equity in my work and life and basically became a180 degrees different than I was just a few years ago.
These days I am enjoying deepening my understanding of all topics inclusive leadership, bias, people, and equity. And when I'm not reading, I am busy photographing, engaging in long-form writing, or creating art.
My bio reads: I have been a leader in the social impact sector for over 20 years. My focus has been on designing programs that help racialized and marginalized communities achieve economic self-sufficiency, working closely with corporations to help them change racially biased hiring practices, and building the capacity of the non-profit sector to change systems. My lived experiences have afforded me a unique perspective on transformative systems change. I bring experiences from the workplace, from my travels, and from my childhood that have shaped my understanding of community, leadership, and human development.
A copy of my resume is available here.
Still curious about me? Great! Let's connect on LinkedIn!