04-02-19 Radical Transformational Leadership: What does this imply?
Guest Speaker: Pervin Varma
Transforming Organizations: Manifesting Human Rights
Join us for a conversation with Pervin Varma. Her work has spanned a diverse range of organizations and roles, from a short stint in the corporate sector with an advertising agency to spending over 28 years in the development sector with one of India’s pioneering child rights organizations – CRY (Child Rights and You). Parvin shares her leadership approach, which is based on the belief that an organisation’s values, vision, mission, goals, ethos and convictions have to be shaped collectively and lived through every member, every action and every outcome. She brings these ideas into her work with the Boards of the organisations she serves on, spanning life skills for young people from adverse backgrounds, working on issues of urban poverty, countering fundamentalism through peace and justice conversations and initiatives, shaping strategy for corporate engagement in social transformation, building capacities for leaders working on public-private partnerships.
Pervin says that the Conscious Full Spectrum (CSF) approach has truly been transformational for her personally and professionally– “It’s not just an approach that I use at or for work but resonates deeply as a way of life. For me it’s become the 3 Circles of Life where our being, thinking or seeing and doing are deeply interconnected and have to operate simultaneously.” This framework holds different tools, frameworks and perspectives together, a meta framework as it were, that integrates different approaches and instruments, tools and templates in a coherent, transformational whole. And the more we engage with the process and see it come alive, the more we discover ourselves through our work —it is learning in action at its very best!
In this environment of the Me Too campaign, closer home the anti-corruption movement or the move to suppress free speech and create a climate of fear and silence, this CFS framework and approach is not just about being effective, it is unequivocally essential for transformational compassionate and sustainable work and results. Our very existence is predicated on there being a deep congruence between who we are, what we stand for, what shifts will we commit to and what we do.
Nineteenth Episode: Guest in the 2nd segment: Pervin Varma
Bio: Pervin Varma’s work has spanned a diverse range of organizations and roles, from a short stint in the corporate sector with an advertising agency to spending over 28 years in the development sector first with one of India’s pioneering child rights organizations – CRY.
In advertising she discovered her life-long belief in the power of communications and the arts to transform society. Her leadership approach CRY and elsewhere was, and continues to be, based on the belief that an organisation’s values, vision, mission, goals, ethos and convictions have to be shaped collectively and lived through every member, every action and every outcome.
Pervin discovered the Conscious Full Spectrum Response Framework when Dr Monica Sharma trained peace activists brought together by Citizens for Peace in Mumbai India and that transformed the way she looked at leadership and designing for large scale change. Since she has brought this approach into all the areas of her work specifically her work on NGO Boards. Currently she serves as a Trustee on the Boards of CRY, Citizens for Peace (CFP), Dream a Dream, Pratham Books and is a member of the Advisory Board of Safe Kids India. For over 20 years she has been a regular member of Ashoka Innovators for Change’s Fellowship selection panel in India, which seeks to find transformational social entrepreneurs with new ideas seeking to engage with some of the most intractable problems of our time.
Music and more specifically song has been an essential part of her being from the time she was a child and she has now woven that into her work with senior citizens. Starting a choir in a retirement home that is about restoring hope, meaning and joy into the lives of the members and breaking the myth that age is in any way a limitation to living the abundant life. This has led her to look at working with the artistes’ community to look at how the arts can be powerful spaces for transformational conversations and action around issues of peace, justice, compassion, empathy and freedom.
The core value that has underpinned her life work has been a deep commitment to people’s agency and potential to be extraordinary changemakers in the world. And she has spent her time enabling people to discover their unique voice and gifts and providing them with the tools and frameworks to go out and live and work to their full potential.
Pervin is based in Bengaluru, India
Pervin Varma pervinvarma@gmail.com
+91 9620201142
