Hi -

I want to introduce Anasuya Sengupta as the new Director, Global Learning and Grantmaking at the Wikimedia Foundation.  She will be starting on Monday, July 2.  In this role, Anasuya will lead our work in support of the Funds Dissemination Committee, work with Asaf Bartov on grant-making and with Jessie Wild in helping us to plan, monitor, evaluate and learn from our programmatic work in a new team area, Global Learning and Evaluation that Jessie will be leading (more soon on this).  She will also serve as a close thought-partner for me and the rest of the GD team in the leadership of our work.

I am thrilled that Anasuya is joining us. She brings a deep passion for social justice and an understanding of the power of free knowledge as an enabler of opportunity for everyone. She will help us hold to our commitments to increase the diversity of our community and has great experience working collaboratively to change communities for the better. She is also a really interesting person who I think we will all enjoy being around and learning from.

Below is an introduction that Anasuya prepared.

For those of you who will be at Wikimania, I know Anasuya is excited to meet with all of you there.

Please join me in welcoming Anasuya to our team.

Best,

Barry

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Life will be measured

by notability test?

My secrets are mine! ;-)

...but until we meet in person:

I am an activist turned grant-maker, who has worked nationally, regionally, and internationally, to build and strengthen multi-generational feminist leadership and networks, and to amplify voices from the margins – whether across gender, sexuality, class, caste, race, age, geography or language. I grew up in north Karnataka (southern India), and returned to work in this part of the world after my undergraduate degree in Economics, as a Programme Officer at Samuha, a rural development organisation. I took its lessons with me into an M.Phil. in Development Studies at Oxford, where I studied as a Rhodes Scholar. I led a UNICEF initiative with the Karnataka police from 2001-2007, designing and implementing a state wide system of response to issues of violence against women and children. Over the same period, I served as Associate and researcher with Gender at Work, an international knowledge network for gender equality. I co-edited and wrote for the Association of Women's Rights in Development (AWID) publication, Defending Our Dreams: global feminist voices for a new generation (AWID and Zed Books, 2006), arguably the first international anthology of young feminist analyses and experience. I have founded campaigns, and been involved with national and international networks against religious and cultural fundamentalisms, and for sexual and reproductive rights and women's health.

In 2007, I moved from Bangalore to Berkeley, as a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley and the Managing Trustee of a small Stanford-based family foundation funding in South India. Over the past three years, I have been Regional Program Director for Asia and Oceania at the Global Fund for Women, one of the world's largest grant-making organisations exclusively for women's human rights. In this capacity, I have overseen over 300 grants to women-led organisations in the region – from Afghanistan to Kiribati - and helped develop a framework for evaluating and learning our impact on organisational growth and movement sustainability. My interest in the politics of technology has been from the point of view of a women’s rights activist, academic, and grant-maker. With Bangalore as home, surrounded by friends and family who are progressive technologists, I started questioning the politics of the software and hardware that is ubiquitous in our lives – and ended up using Ubuntu Linux on my laptop. However, the Free/Libre and Open Source Movement is not simply about technologies; at its heart is the feminist principle that governs my politics: if knowledge is power, then the empowerment of the marginalised is through a democratisation of knowledge, and the equality of the future is through a deconstruction of the privileging powers of access, voice, representation and participation.

I am passionate about poetry (a haiku a day keeps my blues away), theatre, and music, and challenge myself with yoga. I tend to stick with my post-colonial British form of spelling and punctuation ('s' over 'z' and a nuanced use of the Oxford comma) unless explicitly asked not to do so.