Kavita Ramdas: Portrait of a GroundBreaker
GroundBreakers is excited to feature Kavita Ramdas, the Director of the Open Society Foundations’ Women’s Rights Program and Founder of KNR Sisters, on this week’s Portrait of a GroundBreaker Series.
Kavita Ramdas is the Director of the Open Society Foundations’ Women’s Rights Program and Founder of KNR Sisters, a consulting practice in Gender Justice Philanthropy. She has led an impactful career as a leading global advocate for women’s rights and a respected thought leader in the fields of social change philanthropy, intersectional equity, and social entrepreneurship. Ramdas was previously the CEO and President of the Global Fund for Women and served as a strategy advisor to MADRE, an international nonprofit partnering with grassroots women’s organizations and uniting activists to end human rights abuses. She is a member of the Henry Crown Fellows Program of the Aspen Institute and previously served on the boards of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Women’s Funding Network, and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, among other involvements. On this week’s feature of GroundBreakers’ Portrait of a GroundBreaker Series, our discussion with Kavita ranged from the importance of Indigenous women’s knowledge to the need to question the distance of the mainstream social entrepreneurship space from activist movements.
What motivated you to start KNR Sisters?
KNR Sisters was started to respond to the needs of different communities in advancing women’s rights as well as to access philanthropy. I had heard of so many organizations with the name of “associates” or “sons” attached but never a consulting practice or firm with the words “daughters” or “sisters.” I’m the oldest of three sisters and I’ve spent most of my life working in the space of global women’s movements. We think of that space as a global sisterhood. I wanted KNR Sisters to be different and to represent that global sisterhood. People aren’t used to seeing “sisters” as part of a logo or company name and our world is built on the assumption that men are the ones with authority, responsibility, and credibility. Arguing that women have these same capacities means going up against the dominant narrative and this narrative is one in which men are competent and women are not.
“We are facing huge global challenges but I do think that women across the world have been mobilizing and making huge gains. We have the indigenous knowledge for a better world but we must make the time and listen to women in rural and Indigenous communities who possess valuable skills and information.”
How is the work of women often marginalized within the mainstream social entrepreneurship field?
There is a discrepancy in the mainstream social entrepreneurship space in terms of representation of women social entrepreneurs. There are lots of amazing women social entrepreneurs doing incredible work but there is always more coverage of the work of men in the top networks. Social entrepreneurs are typically framed as individualistic heroes, and women don’t typically organize in that way. Women organize collectively. It is often extremely dangerous for them to take on the kinds of challenges that they are taking on because they know they will get a huge amount of pushback. They also know they will get better results when they work together.
These collective efforts of women are often not seen as entrepreneurial. The ways we have defined leadership and entrepreneurial traits are still so stuck in the dominant narrative of risk-taking. It is difficult for women to fit that narrative. Women may be unbelievably gutsy, risky, creative, and entrepreneurial in what they’re trying to do but the way they go about it and how the community sees it is very different from how a man doing the same work would be viewed.
For the longest time in history, women have played disproportionately large roles in the spaces of social work and social change and continue to do so. Examples include volunteering at churches and running orphanages — these were activities that women did and they were not seen as adding value to the economy.
Bill Drayton reframed such work as social entrepreneurship when he started Ashoka. Using the word “entrepreneur,” which is associated with business, made it more acceptable for men to be in this space that was previously just seen as social work that weak women did.
“…Our world is built on the assumption that men are the ones with authority, responsibility, and credibility. Arguing that women have these same capacities means going up against the dominant narrative and this narrative is one in which men are competent and women are not.”
What were the goals behind starting the Social Entrepreneurs in Residence Program at Stanford?
This program is now called the Social Entrepreneurs in Residence Program and is housed at the Haas Center for Public Service. I wanted to call this program the “Activists in Residence” program but there was an aversion to the word “activist” with a desire for a different name. I started the program because of the amazing women who I had gotten to know while running the Global Fund for Women. These women took huge risks, worked unbelievably hard and rarely got the time to step away from the stress of their day to day and all of the struggles they were up against. I thought it was important for their wellbeing to have an opportunity to have some time away to come back to their work renewed.
I could see women in the community struggling and I had this dream of having them come for a few months to a beautiful campus and recover and recoup from their life on the front lines. I also realized that a lot of the students at Stanford, even if they were of economic means, wouldn’t necessarily have the resources it would take to go and meet activists where they are. It was a great opportunity to have students connect with these amazing women entrepreneurs when they so often hear from academics who may not be dealing with issues of democracy or civil society directly.
You wrote a very important article in 2011 about the distance of the mainstream social entrepreneurship space from historical connections and social movements. How is this distance also gendered?
We have to ask the question of how is an activist different than a social entrepreneur? Are we only associating social entrepreneurship with people producing a new technological gadget rather than people driving structural change? We now have this fixation on social entrepreneurs as those people with a technological fix. This results in not recognizing the work of women who are organizing collectively in their communities as agents of social change and social entrepreneurs.
Some scholars in the field have claimed that activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi are not social entrepreneurs. The reality is that King and Gandhi were indeed social entrepreneurs and many people could argue that Jesus and Muhammed were also social entrepreneurs. These are people who saw social problems and worked to solve them. They saw flaws in the way society was organized and tried to figure out a different way by taking risks and mobilizing people. They are of course men, but there are many women throughout history who were doing similar things but we just don’t have the same knowledge of their stories. We have to challenge this narrative and unconscious bias that men are more capable than women. We don’t realize it’s biased because it’s the dominant frame.
That dominant narrative applies to any marginalized group whose story is intentionally placed outside of the mainstream. The power of that dominant narrative is frightening because it goes into all of us. Women often internalize that sense that we aren’t as capable. Many women and girls have internalized that they are not as good at disciplines like math and science. My sisters and I have amazing parents who supported us, but people would come up to them and apologize that they had three daughters and take pity on the family. And my parents would respond that they were very pleased to have three daughters. My father would say, “Any one of my daughters in better than any one of your sons.”
“We have to ask the question of how is an activist different than a social entrepreneur? Are we only associating social entrepreneurship with people producing a new technological gadget rather than people driving structural change?”
How have you been connected to the work of Indigenous women through your work at MADRE?
I have been working at MADRE over the past year and have enjoyed the chance to connect with Indigenous women. MADRE was founded in 1985 when Indigenous women in Nicaragua called on women in the United States to come and see with their own eyes what the policies of the U.S. were doing to the women in Nicaragua. That’s why the organization is called “Madre,” because it represents mothers having a conversation.
They are working with an Indigenous group in Kenya right now that has been on the frontlines of climate justice in response to climate change. MADRE’s work with the Indigenous Information Network there advances grassroots women’s solutions including advocacy for better climate policies.
Climate justice is a huge issue all around the world and is an area in which women are being unbelievably entrepreneurial. One of the biggest lessons that they’re showing us is how to think differently about the way life is organized. Our society is organized around never having enough — capitalism is fundamentally organized around the principle of greed. The entire economy of capitalist systems is built on consumption. As Gandhi once said, this world has enough for every person’s need but not every person’s greed. Indigenous women teach us that we have to live in balance with the planet. The planet will take care of you if you take care of her. We have been living in a way that resembles debt to the planet because we keep extracting and not giving back and we are driving ourselves bankrupt.
We are facing huge global challenges but I do think that women across the world have been mobilizing and making huge gains. We have the indigenous knowledge for a better world but we must make the time and listen to women in rural and Indigenous communities who possess valuable skills and information.
We currently have men running different countries, from Trump in the U.S. to Duterte in the Philippines, and I think it’s the last gasp of a male-dominated, extractive, consumptive system. Our Earth and societies are out of balance and the women have to bring that balance back. This does not mean women are taking over because they have been doing amazing work all along. In the face of our current challenges, I believe in the sisters.
