Session 2 | Liberatory Leadership in Practice: Transformative Leadership Programs

Speakers

Neha Mahajan is the daughter of South Asian Punjabi immigrants and brings nearly 20 years of experience fighting for social justice. Over the last 13 years, Neha has led multiple philanthropic and community organizations in the Colorado ecosystem. Neha co-founded Transformative Leadership for Change (TLC) in 2017, and is honored to now step into a paid position to help make TLC’s vision a reality. She is also currently on the board of Cultivando (Commerce City, Colorado) and on the coordinating committee of the national NorthStar Network. In addition to her role at TLC, she weaves together social justice, healing, and spiritual practices in her consulting and coaching business – NehaDevi Consulting.
Denise Perry has more than 35 years of labor and community organizing, dedicated to developing strong grassroots leaders, democratic organizations, and progressive social movements. She has been a labor union organizer and trainer. Internationally she worked with a team to develop the Women’s Global Equity Project, which took her throughout Africa and the Caribbean to train and work with women labor activists. She co-founded Power U Center for Social Change, rooted in Miami’s historically Black community of Overtown. She has served on a variety of Boards. Today she is the Director and co-Founder of Black Organizing for Leadership & Dignity (BOLD) which is developing leadership for transformative organizing amongst Black organizers across the country.

The second session with Denise Perry of BOLD and Neha Mahajan of Transformative Leadership for Change mapped out how transformative leadership programs prepare leaders to carry these practices into their orgs and into the field. Often the way transformative change makes its way into organizations is through individuals but the goal is not for liberatory transformation to stay with these individuals, the goal is to transform organizations so we can transform systems and society. What we heard from Denise and Neha is that the required transformations in our organizations begins with individuals and the way these transformations happens is that we give people space to create a set of commitments that they want to live by and giving them a set of practices that help them to embody and return to those commitments all while recognizing that they are existing in a culture that does not support those liberatory commitments. Finally they are connected to a network of support to practice movement interdependence as they learn and build it.