Sreejani Malakar

Sreejani is the founder and Director of AYLI Peers Foundation- a peer led mental health collective that enables non-judgmental dialogic spaces and strengthens leadership of young people to challenge mental health stigma. Sreejani has been in the social development sector working on diverse socio-cultural issues like gender, sexuality, youth focused movements for a decade.

She is trained in Leadership, organize, Action (LOA) course from the Harvard Kennedy School by Prof. Marshall Ganz, and prioritises her work around the leadership practices of relationship building and crafting stories for change. In her work on mental health, she brings in the LOA practices rooted in people, stories and relational power in challenging stigma. In 2019, as part of Haiyya (youth feminist organization in India), with the community of young unmarried women, she led and won the campaign Health Over Stigma by shifting accountability to service providers to ensure stigma free sexual and reproductive health services to unmarried women- this changed her life and approach towards leadership and since then, she has been an organizer for life! She has completed the Train the Trainers Program from Leading Change Network(LCN) and has been loving the role of a trainer and coach in multiple workshops and trainings regionally, nationally and globally for 6+years. A proud moment for her was when she was a coach for the Obama Foundation Public Narrative Workshop series.