Transformative Leadership in our Personal And Professional Lives with SriLatha Batliwala
In this episode, we have the privilege of speaking with Srilatha Batliwala, a feminist activist, scholar, and trainer based in Bangalore. With over two decades of experience in grassroots movement building with marginalized women in India, Srilatha brings a wealth of knowledge and insights to our conversation. She challenges the traditional patriarchal model of leadership and proposes a different approach that centers around shared visions of social justice and equality.
Join us as we delve into the transformative power of leadership, the importance of internalized change for social transformation, and the role of art in challenging the status quo. Get ready to be inspired and empowered as we uncover the keys to creating meaningful change in our personal and professional lives with Srilatha Batliwala.
Srilatha Batliwala
Srilatha Batliwala is a feminist activist-scholar and trainer and currently Senior Advisor, Knowledge Building at CREA. She is also a Senior Associate at Gender at Work, a global network of gender experts supporting organizations to build cultures of equality and inclusion, and Honorary Professor of Practice at SOAS, University of London. Her work focuses on building knowledge from practice, and capacity building of young activists and social justice organizations to advance feminist visions of social justice through feminist movement building and feminist leadership.
Through the past four decades, Srilatha’s work has spanned grassroots activism, building movements of highly marginalized grassroots women, research and scholarly work, policy advocacy, grant-making, and capacity building of young women activists around the world. Up to the mid-90s, she was involved for over twenty years in grassroots work in India, where she helped build large-scale women’s movements that mobilized and empowered tens of thousands of the most socio-economically marginalized rural and urban women in slum communities in Mumbai (Bombay) and in the backward districts of Karnataka state in South India.
Thereafter, she worked internationally including as Civil Society Program Officer at the Ford Foundation, New York (1997-2000), Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations (2000 – 2007), and from 2008 – 2016 as Scholar Associate at AWID (Association for Women’s Rights in Development). She has also served on the boards of several International and national women’s rights and development organizations (WEDO, PLAN, AWID, ISTSR, Just Associates, Gender at Work) and currently serves on the International Advisory Board of IHRB (Institute for Human Rights and Business), the Advisory Council of the Population Foundation of India, the Governing Council of the Srishti Institute for Art, Design and Technology, and chairs the Board of IT for Change.
Srilatha has written and published extensively on a range of gender issues, and is best known for her work on women’s empowerment, women’s movements, feminist leadership, and feminist approaches to monitoring and evaluation. Her most recent publications are (i) “Feminist Mentoring for Feminist Futures”, “All About Power” and “All About Movements”, primers for activists; and (ii) “Engaging with Empowerment – An Intellectual and Experiential Journey” (Women Unlimited, 2014, and eBook version 2015), a collection of her writings of the past twenty years.
Srilatha commutes between homes in Bangalore and the Nilgiri Hills of South India and is an active feminist grandmother to her four grandchildren!
Resources from the Episode
Some of Srilatha’s writings:
All About Movements: Why Building Movements Creates Deeper Change
Feminist Leadership for Social Transformation: Clearing the Conceptual Cloud
The organizations mentioned near the end of the podcast:
Episode Transcript
Image descriptions: teal background. Black and white text. Two end images have red leaf graphics in the left corner and a photo of an open journal on a white desk with a cup of coffee and pine cones nearby. Middle image has a red spiral in bottom right corner.