Darshan Khalsa on making social justice work impactful, sustainable, and meaningful

This January, Rivera Consulting Inc. welcomed Darshan Khalsa as our Vice-President. Darshan comes with decades of national movement-building experience. She is deeply passionate about strengthening sustainability and resources for the folks who work in social justice movements, especially racial and gender justice. Learn more below about what brought Darshan to this work, and our team!

Twenty years ago, I moved to New York City and entered law school with a vague idealistic notion of changing the world. The defining moment of my first semester, watching the Supreme Court determine the 2000 election in Bush v. Gore, felt like watching the fall of democracy. Nearly a year later, I listened to endless sirens after planes flew into the World Trade Center and the towers fell.

The first thing I felt was fear. Fear for my brother and father. “Please don’t let it be Muslims,” I remember chanting to myself, already anticipating the news of a terrorist attack, already imagining the threats to Muslim and Sikh communities, including my own Sikh family. A few days later, on 9/15, a Sikh man, Balbir Singh Sodhi, was gunned down outside his gas station in Mesa, Arizona - one of the first documented hate crimes to follow 9/11. It felt too close.

Bush v. Gore and 9/11 didn’t change the world I live in – but they changed how I understood it.

I am the daughter of a divorced Indian mother and father and a white stepmother, and racial complexity was something I had always had to navigate. Code switching between my white suburban hometown and my Indian Sikh community didn’t come easily to me. I tried to fit in everywhere as best as I could - felt unbearably awkward when I could not. My own precarious sense of identity was private. And invisible.

Suddenly, I couldn’t maintain the separation. Sikhs were visible. My family was in danger. We had been all along, and I hadn’t taken it seriously. All people of color were – and now the danger felt real and urgent to me. “Your silence will not protect you,” said Audre Lorde, and I finally understood what she meant. This was life and death. Compartmentalizing my identity was no longer an option. It did not keep me safe – and had never truly done so.

I left law to start a political action committee - called the Racial Justice Campaign - that focused on getting progressive people of color elected to office. My electoral work gave me the opportunity to meet leaders of color doing amazing social justice work. Here was the work I had sought: leadership development! grassroots advocacy! movement building! I had found my people.

Since 2005, I have had the privilege of working for smart, strategic women of color with incredible visions heading social justice organizations – and helping them move from ideas to action. My leadership roles have encompassed strategic and organizational development, finance and operations, HR, fundraising, and communications. I have worked in multiracial organization and Asian and Pacific Islander ones on issues addressing reproductive justice, media justice, community and economic development, and health care.

Through it all, making social justice work impactful, sustainable, and meaningful for the people engaging in it has been my personal mission. My real journey though, has always been about changing the world – about asking transformative questions: What is the world we want to live in? Who do we want to be? What can we build together that is resilient, that is powerful, that will not fall? I’m excited to be doing this work with Rivera Consulting and proud to be part of a team that honors who we want to be in our pursuit of power and justice for our communities.