REIMAGINE S2 EPISODE 5

Baljeet Sandhu [00:00:02] There's been a reawakening on a mass scale and how we need to come together from, say, even just last year where we couldn't even use terms like racial justice in the U.K., now we're talking about how to equitably and meaningfully work with communities from the grassroots up. And that is exciting. 

Peter Drobac [00:00:28] Hi, I'm Peter Drobac, and you're listening to Reimagine: Systems Reset Edition. Our motto here at Reimagine HQ is Challenge Everything. And in this special series, we're meeting people who are shaking up the status quo, people who remind us that in the words of the late Elijah Cummings, we're better than this. They're not tinkering around the edges. We're talking full throttle systems reset. You've heard me say that equity is the only way out of this pandemic, and I think that's true of all the crises we face in this new decade, whether disparities of access and survival with covid-19, the yawning educational divide as millions of kids are ghosted from school systems or the systemic racism lying deep in the DNA of our institutions, inequity is a common fault line. Now, usually when we talk about equity, it's through the lens of demographics or identity, race, gender, country of origin, income. Today we're going to explore a different kind of lens: knowledge equity. Knowledge equity is the idea that expertise comes in many forms. It's a commitment to elevate the knowledge and communities that have been left out to value the insights that come from lived experience and to break down the barriers that prevent people from freely accessing and contributing knowledge. Too often we see innovation as needing to come from the top down, from elites and technocrats. Knowledge equity might help us to flip the script. 

Peter Drobac [00:02:04] And to help us with said flipping, we're talking today with a woman who is dismantling inequality at its roots, Baljeet Sandhu. 

Peter Drobac [00:02:12] Baljeet is a pioneer of the lived experience leadership movement. She's seen that too often the change makers around the table don't actually understand the problems they're trying to fix and that we can't reform our broken systems without the insights from the communities most disadvantaged by them. To address the big challenges of our time, we need to connect traditional learnt and technical knowledge with lived expertise. And that's what Baljeet does at the Centre for Knowledge Equity, which she recently founded here in the U.K.. I first met Baljeet at Yale when she was a Fellow there and was struck immediately by her clarity of purpose and her disarmingly honeyed ferocity. Usually when someone challenges our assumptions, we tend to get a bit defensive. When Baljeet challenges you, you feel warm and fuzzy. That's a special talent. We've since gone on to work together at the Skoll Centre here in Oxford, where we're embedding knowledge equity into all our work. And we were over the moon recently when Baljeet was awarded a Queen's Honour, an MBE for Services to Equality and Civil Society. I love chatting with Baljeet. In our conversation about equity, inclusion and what she calls wisdom leadership, she managed to squeeze in a bit of quantum thinking, at least one Einstein quote and a whole lot of love. We have a lot in common, including that very early in our careers, we both worked in the children's rights space. Mine was a lot less accomplished than Baljeet's. But when I was 22, I worked for a children's rights advocacy centre in Tanzania at the height of the AIDS pandemic that was orphaning millions of children. It was a searing and formative experience, one that led me to medical school and everything that came after. Baljeet began her career as a community organiser and went on to become an accomplished children's rights lawyer. I asked her about her background and how that phase of her career drew her to the idea of lived experience leadership. 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:04:19] So I was raised in a working class migrant family and experienced first hand, really flawed systems that oppressed, that violated my family's rights, my community's rights. And, you know, I was raised in the 1980s and it was a time where, you know, a serious recession, government policy decimated our local industries, public services, extreme, extreme social distress, you know, flowing from that in unimaginable ways, you know, crushing poverty, hunger, increasing drug and alcohol addiction, and the revealing of racism within institutions including our police force in the U.K., which was finally, finally revealed publicly following the Stephen Lawrence enquiry. This journey, Peter, I think, has also allowed me to tap into the fact that, you know, my firsthand experience of the brutality that I experienced myself of the interplay of health, immigration, justice and care systems in my own life are reasons why I wanted to also become a lawyer, to use those experiences to fight for justice. And that's where really where the fire for that came from. I always knew that I wanted to give back to my community, but the law degree takes all the glory. But for many years, my lived experience of long being working hard behind the scenes to build strategies for change and provide me a really deep understanding of the root causes of the realities that many of the young people I represented and served and worked alongside. I wasn't just a young girl of colour from a migrant family. I was a working class girl from Nottingham who was just simply trying to give back. 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:06:07] I actually never thought I was going to be a lawyer and probably that's been a blessing, as many of my colleagues now are having crises around why they are lawyers and what was the reason for coming into the human rights space. But I actually was a community organiser and it's really there that I started to actually come into contact with, and this was over 20 years ago, young people who had arrived on our shores from war torn countries who were on their own in in local authority care and social services in Nottingham and put them into a number of the programmes that I was working on. And one of them was a young offenders programme, and they had not committed any offence. And so it was there for my sins that I became a lawyer. 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:06:53] And it was really to craft an understanding about the rights of these very vulnerable children with unique needs who were coming from from different countries and who had faced human rights violations. And that's how I entered the legal profession. 

Peter Drobac [00:07:07] So you didn't become a lawyer to uphold the law, as it were, because the law was broken, at least in this specific case, you became a lawyer to fix the law, as it were. Can you give an example of a place where you broke through and had some success? 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:07:20] Yes. So, for example, in the UK, we sadly many years ago used to detain families in immigration detention, not necessarily understanding that we were also detaining small children and the impact that detention was having on these children. And so we were able to work with so many of those incredible human beings working across various spaces to start to disrupt how we were incarcerating migrant families in the UK. But starting from the lens of the child, which was quite successful with support from the children's commissioner for England at the time. And it's yeah, it was great to be part of an incredible community to bring forward that case. 

Peter Drobac [00:07:59] Mm, remarkable. Did you, as you were trying to bring forth some of your experience as an engaged member of the community and a community organiser to try to articulate some of the complexities and context of the children you were representing and advocating for, did you find much resistance to that within sort of the, I'd call it establishment? 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:08:21] Yeah, I mean, first of all, I mean, what I found was actually having straplines such as 'Child first, migrant second' was an easy way, rather than going into complex laws and rights and entitlements and case law to just simply say, hang on, everyone, let's just think about the fact that think about your children. 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:08:38] You know, would you want your children to be treated like this? That's when we start to really be able to have just conversations with people as human beings, whether they were working for government, working for the Immigration Department, whether they were social workers or whether they were human rights activists. I think we all just had to go centre and ground ourselves that we're talking about children here. And let's think of our own children and children in our communities. And that changed changed the conversation. But, yes, resistance, I think often resistance happens when you start to explore and unpack that. What we've found is I think maybe from my community organising days is going back to the human, even in our human rights space. Sadly, we can often forget the human in human rights. 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:09:21] I joke now with many of my friends because I often refer to myself as a recovering human rights lawyer because I had to leave the human rights space. I mean, incredible people, incredible professionals and technical experts. But I was absolutely dismayed because although I represented a lot of children, I often also was involved in a number of cases of supporting activists, social justice fighters, women's rights advocates from around the world, LGBTQI activists, people who were fighting dictators around the world, who we when we watched them on our TV screens, would be amazed with the incredible courage, you know, and dismayed by the persecution we were witnessing on our TV screens. Once they arrived on our shores in Europe, they all of a sudden became not these activists and change makers, but vulnerable asylum seekers who needed our support rather than actually seeing them as courageous human beings who could also work alongside us. 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:10:20] But the more and more I started to actually be around the table with innovators, designers in the charity, space policy makers, I just started to realise that it was actually a lot of human being sitting around the table trying to create solutions to problems they didn't understand communities at the hard edge of social injustice. The notion that those very people could also be change makers in their own right was something that we just didn't seem to really understand. So so it was that that took me on this journey from being a human rights lawyer to start thinking about do we value the the knowledge that people with lived experience have? And if we understand that as knowledge, how are we giving that knowledge agency in social and environmental purpose work? 

Peter Drobac [00:11:04] Mm. The system, as you describe it, sounds really dehumanising. Right, however well-intentioned it may be. And I think that is it's a common error when rather than making common cause with folks, we objectify the people we're ostensibly trying to help and not recognising that they are humans on equal footing with agency, with ideas and with expertise. And what what I think you've really taught me is this concept of lived experience. You know, leadership is really about recognising different kinds of expertise. And so maybe let's talk about that. And if it's OK, let's frame it for a moment along the lines of expertise, because I think especially now we're living in a moment where the so-called expert has been so politicised and sometimes demonised and not always wrongly. But as you discussed, your work suggests there are different kinds of expertise. And I wonder whether this kind of more inclusive approach. Thinking about lived experience as being a different kind of expertise might be an antidote to some of the polarisation that we're facing right now. 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:12:15] It's really interesting question, but I'm going to go into my feelings now, Peter, rather than think with my head and mind. 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:12:25] I get a real feeling of sadness when I hear you talk about, you know, the experts that are currently being often challenged. There's some good human beings from from the research space and academia and scientists who are really trying to tackle some of the most pressing issues of our time. So that's where I get sadness because I see this as seeing this happen for a long, long time. It's nothing new. My observations over the years have largely been around this damaging disconnect that we have between the worlds of who are knowledge producers, who we consider as experts with ordinary citizens in this world. You know, when we talk about expertise, we need to start to think about learned expertise, practise expertise, but we also need to think about lived expertise. And when I talk about lived expertise and came up with that notion is that every human being's lived and everyone's has an experience. But there are incredible human beings who moved beyond story of self to actually activate the knowledge that they've gathered through their lived experiences. But the hidden truth really is that we're often neglecting or ignoring or suppressing that knowledge and lived expertise because there's a serious imbalance in our social good ecosystem and equilibrium around what knowledge we can actually bring to the table or embrace or actually celebrate or even talk about. And so I started to get other professionals to think about lived experiences, lived expertise that was needed around that table. That's not been easy because incredible technical experts were quite confronted and threatened, even fearful of that notion of lived expertise. And I often feel this is a fear for the relevance of their own work being challenged. 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:14:15] So there's this still this ongoing kind of ideological ferment over the validity of different forms of expertise and different forms of knowledge. 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:14:26] And I think that's truly stifling not only human ingenuity, but our human connection, because we need all forms of of knowledge to be coming together. And if we don't do that now more than ever, we will continue to perpetuate the harms. Because if we don't think about the incredible knowledge that is present across all of our communities, we will continue to privilege a few as knowledge producers and see them as having a larger stake in how we design the future. And I think we need to totally disrupt and reimagine that. I think there's lots of fears and anxiety that shouldn't be there. 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:15:02] I'm going to go surprise seems quite delusional and I think I don't know why. I'm coming up with a quote from Einstein here, Peter, 'The only source of knowledge is experience.' 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:15:13] And then he went on to say that 'information is not knowledge'. So if experience is knowledge, why are we not valuing lived experience as well? And I think what's happened is that we can often forget that gift and focus on the rational mind and technical learned expertise over the gifts of human wisdom

Baljeet Sandhu [00:15:33] we gather through other experiences. 

Peter Drobac [00:15:37] If you want a recipe for the secret sauce of innovation, I think it starts with bringing these different kinds of expertise together. We're going to talk more about knowledge equity. But first, let's bring this to life a bit. Baljeet and her colleagues have built an incredible community of lived experience leaders. I asked her to tell us what this looks like in practise. 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:15:59] Human history illuminates the power of lived experience to to craft change, pioneer change, create innovations and inventions. I wish the man who invented the wheel had a business degree and an engineering degree. And this whole notion of people who are experiencing problems will try to invent solutions and try to address those issues. And then we can turn to our incredible social justice movements, the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, the disability rights movement. You know, I often say to incredible female leaders that I've worked alongside. I wish the women's rights movement was started by men. It's just not how human life works. And so many of our movements have been started by change makers and activists who have direct, firsthand experience of the social injustices they're facing. Let's think about services, inventions and design that has taken place. Going back to the example of the wheel. Alcoholics Anonymous was created by five alcoholics in the Christian church over 100 years ago. It revolutionised our whole understanding of social care provision, you know, which is for many years now has just been adapted and adapted. Refuge, the first safe house for domestic violence survivors was crafted and designed by a child survivor of domestic violence. Fast forward in modern society and now these incredible leaders, change-makers and activists that I have the honour of working with alongside. You know, we have women of colour working on racial bias in AI. We have leaders who lived experience in the UK, who have lived experience of incarceration, but also in the U.S. using tech to revolutionise communications between families and people who are incarcerated. We have marginalised communities in local areas in the UK, but also in other countries, creating new economic models for marginalised communities, for example, loan systems or models for, say, undocumented migrant families and communities. You know, these are just just examples of a few ways that leaders with lived experience are not just using their lived experience, they're integrating and activating it. And that's truly where innovation can happen, where you understand the problem. But you also then have the tools and knowledge from your learnt and practise experience to actually design solutions. And that's the world we want to be in.

Peter Drobac [00:18:33] What does the term knowledge equity mean? 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:18:36] Okay, so. So when I started the journey of lived experience, again, a notion that comes from from my forefathers, from all this over decades, it was really just to get us to understand that as knowledge, you know, and once we got everybody to realise it wasn't a vulnerable identity, lived experience is a form of knowledge. It was then to understand, well, if it's knowledge, how are we giving that knowledge agency? Its that age old saying of knowledge is power. And as we move into a world where it's the knowledge economy, Peter, where we're moving away from industries towards an understanding that knowledge will be the driver of the future workforce, why is it that there are certain forms of knowledge we are not valuing? One of the things that I found deeply disturbing in the social good ecosystem is that economic justice, even in our own realms, we need to hold a mirror to our own practises where we often expect change makers on the hard edge of social injustice to be change makers for free once we all get paid. And that's the real inequity. And the hidden, hidden truth right now is we know we need the lived experience and the knowledge of our communities we purport to serve. 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:19:46] We know that we craft various approaches in our sector, whether it's focus groups, community consultations, hackathon, you know, human centred design. We know that knowledge is important, but often we're not giving it true agency. And that's where I was pondering on this notion of, well, how do we start to think about knowledge equity? You know, how do we start to examine the dominant cultures that we're plagued by in terms of who we see or who we believe to be knowledge producers? I think, simply put, people from unique and diverse backgrounds, experiences need to be in safe spaces where their knowledge is given agency. We need to embrace and honour the fact that there are different ways of knowing, but we also have to respect that we all don't know what we don't know. And how can we craft equitable and meaningful ways to bring different forms of human knowledge together? It's that I truly believe that we can start to attend to issues of equity, diversity and inclusion. And it's also then that we can truly understand the wisdom of incredible humans, you know, who've inspired us like Audrey Lorde when she says, you know, 'the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house', and I think we all need to change the way that we start thinking about and the way that we connect different forms of knowledge to create wisdom. 

Peter Drobac [00:21:12] One of the under-told stories of the pandemic is the way that change makers and social entrepreneurs have been on the front lines of the response in their own communities. You touched on this a bit, but I know that you've been doing a lot of work this year, tireless work to help support young leaders in the covid-19 response. What have you seen and what have you learnt over these last few months? 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:21:33] Oh, well, I mean, it's just been incredibly, incredibly inspiring. It's an intense time for many. I think we all can agree that the pandemic has shown us more than ever the power of local communities to act, to innovate at speed, at pace where many who have power have been paralysed by unfolding events. So a lot of the work that we've been doing during the pandemic is to work with funders, investors, mainstream charities to start to think about how do we resource that innovation happening in communities where activists, change makers who have a really real time, deep rooted understanding of what is happening. 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:22:13] That's where it's just been incredible. We've worked with various funders to create funds for lived experienced leaders who are trying to actually innovate and respond to covid. We've designed a fund with Blagrave Trust, an incredible fund to recognise the power of young activists who were doing incredible work in their communities and how do we fund them to scale their ideas and work. And it's just been incredible. You know, there's artists, entrepreneurs, strategists truly activating some incredible wisdom from communities, you know, young people working, using the arts to think about how to address the needs of young people leaving incarceration, but also to help craft and elevate that knowledge, to inform policymaking. We've seen young people work using tech to address the injustices faced by trans people of colour. I could go on. It's just been incredible. There isn't this constant belief that we're just reacting or there's just an anger in the work that's happening in communities. There's a true, true notion of love and human connection, but also a real hope for a new future. People really thinking about redesigning and thinking about renewal and recovery, not just in this notion of building back better, but actually to redesign and reimagine the future from a space of abundance. And it's just been an honour to witness that work. 

Peter Drobac [00:23:50] That's it's incredibly heartening to hear these stories. And, you know, I think when we think about the recovery, renewal, the reimagine, the reset, all the 're's, you know, to to get this right, you know, this has to come from the, if you will, the bottom up as opposed to the top down. I think we've seen so much kind of centralised technocratic response in the pandemic, and that's important. But change has to be top down and and bottom up. And I think where we failed is where we've neglected that element. You know, I've been saying day after day after day, the vaccine is not going to be a magic bullet that's going to solve all our problems. There is no magic bullet, I don't think. But, you know, if there is, it's it's community, right? 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:24:33] Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think I think also the issues that we were talking about today are not new either. You know, it's just the pandemics just surfaced, pre-existing inequalities that have always been there. But what's so, so important about this moment in our history is that there's been a reawakening on a mass scale of consciousness about how we need to tackle that and how we need to come together. 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:25:00] These collisions of crisis that have happened, you know, have really, really created an evolutionary leap because what I'm finding in a debate that I've been having and, you know, for so many years around this very simple notion of lived experience as a form of knowledge has been so difficult to talk about, because once you move it from civic engagement and participation into leadership or solution design, that just seemed to stagnate constantly. But now there's just a real leap of understanding how we need to actually bring solutions from the community up, as you say. And I'm constantly I think from this jump from, say, even just last year where we couldn't even use terms like racial justice in the UK. But now we're talking about designers, innovators, you know, researchers, academics, all starting to to really think about how they need to start to equitably and meaningfully work with communities from the grassroots up, and that is exciting. But I'm scared, very scared because we've been here before, this can be cyclical, where we're constantly having the same discussions. Again, there's a moment there's an alarm, but then people go back to the way it used to be. So when I think of terms like proximate leader, fantastic, you know, brilliant, you've got to be close to the communities, understand the communities, not be parachuting into communities. But we can do much better. We need to understand that actually there are people not just who are proximate to a problem, who have first hand experience of it, create new ways of being and doing and leading together. We can connect worlds in a in a better way and good people creating good trouble, I think we talk about. I mean, this is the moment our younger generations are demanding it loudly, also putting us to shame. We've been slow to act. And I think this is a moment where we can actually not just talk and sit around negotiation tables, we need to start doing. 

Peter Drobac [00:27:12] Something that's come up in my conversations throughout this series, sometimes unintentionally, is looking at leadership in new and different ways, what it's going to take to drive meaningful change in an entangled and interconnected world. So we're going to wrap up now with Baljeet at her cosmic best and her thoughts on what she calls wisdom leadership. The idea really ties together a lot of what she's been talking about, and I just love it. 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:27:40] How do we start tapping into our inner world, there's this real energy and shifting in starting to tap into how we become generous leaders and how we can use compassion and kindness in the work that we do, you know, good vibes. You know, how do we start to connect with our hearts as well as our minds? I was around a group of academics who work in the leadership space in in New York hearing about the work of researchers around quantum leadership, understanding energy fields, and that we are all interconnected and interdependent. So how do we start to tap into different parts of ourselves, but also our collective power as well as our inner power? I think wisdom leadership is a concept that's really just been part of this journey. Again, walking alongside incredible leaders and community leaders who are activating their lived, learned and practised experience, you know, and learning from them how they've moved from adversity through to courage and the wisdom that they collected through often adverse experiences. 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:28:46] But what I want to also really talk about and and it's just been an exciting space and why I'm starting to talk about wisdom leadership, is this isn't just for the communities at the heart of social injustice or economic injustice to be those who are tapping into lived experience. We all should be as human beings often. Again, it's a hidden form of experience that many of us are not actually able to bring to the table. But imagine if we all tapped into not only our learnt experience through the education we go through, the courses we do, the training that we go through. But our practise experience. Used to while you were at university, you were a waitress, you know, what experiences did you bring in terms of juggling that and understanding that practise experience through to experiences of love? What really ignites that passion, but also your own lived experiences? And so how do we get all humans, all incredible entrepreneurs, innovators, change makers, everybody, you know, to start to tap into and acknowledge their lived, learned, practised experiences, but also experiences of love? That's really what wisdom leadership is is about. And that notion of really connecting all of those different forms of experiences together. 

Baljeet Sandhu [00:30:06] Now that I've had the opportunity to reflect on this whole notion of lived experience it's been a truly profound personal journey for me as well. I started to reflect on my own ancestry and heritage. You know, activists in my own family fighting systems of oppression during the partition in India in 1947. And I've always known that, but I just didn't have permission to talk about it. My heart knew it, but it was not something that was valued or honoured or embraced in the kind of technical professional sense. But it shouldn't be so hard. You know, we need to start to make it much easier for younger generations to start to be able to not only honour and acknowledge the various experiences that they're bringing to the table in their work, but also start to say that actually its a valuable form of experience. Be able to make sense of those experiences, learn from them, activate them, can often transcend what even science can't tell us and other technical expertise can't tell us. But I think it's those spaces that we now need to craft and the cultures and the structures to ensure that all humans are given the permission to tap into their inner and outer world, the human spirit in a way that can be joyous. And we can place this in a space of abundance to think about the future together. 

Peter Drobac [00:31:36] We could go on and in fact, we did honestly, we were just getting warmed up, but you must have things to do, so we'll leave it there. My thanks to Baljeet Sandhu for sharing her experience, her insight and her wisdom with us. Next week in my ongoing mission to assemble a podcast series full of women who really should be running the planet, I'll be chatting with Rachel Botsman about leadership and trust. You won't want to miss it. You've been listening to Reimagine, a podcast from the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University's Sa•d Business School. Do you want to see things differently? Subscribe to Reimagine wherever you get your podcasts, and you know the drill, it makes us happy when you take a moment to rate and review us and tell your friends, find me on Twitter @PeterDrobac and to learn more about social entrepreneurship and the Skoll Centre visit reimaginepodcast.com. From Oxford, I'm Peter Drobac, and this is Reimagine, a podcast about people who are inventing the future. Thanks for listening.