I leverage my expertise and experience as a social impact strategist to co-create an equitable and sustainable future.
Why I do this
I started my career in social impact about 12 years ago, driven by a concern for social justice. It stemmed from my personal experience as a minority woman who grew up in an underserved community, and grew with the realization that this personal experience is a product of political structures that put marginalized people at a disadvantage.
Along the way, I began to realize that our fight for social equality and justice is deeply intertwined with the various environmental challenges we face today. The way society marginalizes women and other vulnerable groups is analogous to the way society exploits the environment — who we fittingly call “mother nature.” The result is the climate crisis we face today. A societal challenge that is hard not to take personally, as our collective future is dependent on the actions we take today.
As such, I have dedicated these 12+ years of professional experience leading and running social and environmental projects at community organizations, international non-profits and a public benefit corporation. The following are some examples of work that I’ve done across these issue areas:
My work in this space spans from developing a strategy for advocating for sexual health and reproductive rights education to facilitating co-creation of roadmaps for organizations to practice diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to implementing a program that aims to eliminate religious-based violence by enabling interfaith dialogue, among others.
Gender, Identity, and Human Rights
My work in this space includes developing strategies to activate faith-based communities as drivers for climate action, coordinating an audience research through a nation-wide poll on climate and just energy transition, and implementing a campaign engaging businesses to adopt sustainability practices in order to decarbonize the tourism industry.
Environment, Climate, and Sustainability.
What I do
Within these issue spaces, I contribute to impact by specializing in research, strategy development, and capacity building. I believe that strong issue understanding is required to build robust strategy, which in turn, helps untangle complex issues into impactful and practical actions.
Learn
Gathering knowledge through research activities such as landscape analysis, stakeholders mapping, audience research, and monitoring and evaluation to generate insights on the problems, as well as identify gaps and opportunities.
Design
Synthesizing and distilling insights uncovered in the research phase into frameworks, project strategies, theories of change, roadmaps, toolkits, and platform designs, among others.
Enable
Making sure that partners and teams are set up for success through trainings, monitoring, consultations, knowledge sharing, and other capacity building activities.
How I do it
Social and environmental issues are often entangled and the most impactful initiatives leverage collective action to create a structural change. What I mean by this is that a problem is rarely an isolated phenomenon, it is often an outcome of a problematic system. As a result, we need to shift our approach from changing individuals to enabling individuals to change the system. As a response to this, I apply the following principles throughout my process.
Systemic change.
Building collective action to create shifts in the systems that are responsible for the problem.
Intersectional.
Centering marginalized groups in order to achieve meaningful, equitable impact.
People-driven.
Designing actions that put people first and foremost.
Actionable.
Ensuring that big visions are translated to achievable as well as impactful solutions.
Knowledge-based.
Rooted in credible evidence as well as lived-experience.
Collaborative.
Creating a space for various stakeholders to come together throughout the co-creation process.