What does reading every day’s news about political leaders and their whims tell us about leadership across the world? In an era where autocratic and individualistic forms of leadership are pedestaled as leadership traits, how can we sustain just intentional leadership? We are left with a question here, and we invite you to reflect on it with us: How do we address the crisis of leadership our world has landed in?
To begin unpacking the question, we want to bring in the wisdom of bell hooks, “To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialisation that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.”
In a world where leadership is largely about maintaining a dominant power dynamic, reimagining power is not just a leadership skill—it is about reclaiming space and sharing it too. The crises of leadership in our world require the nurturing of young intersectional feminist leaders towards radically shifting oppressive structures that our world is currently built on, while rebuilding more just and equitable communities. And the One Future Fellowship is our way of germinating such leadership in pockets of the world. It was conceptualised as a space for nurturing value-led social leaders that would go on to radically transform every space they occupy, from the professional to the personal. We envisage this journey as one of ‘building people and not just ideas’.
Having run seven successful cohorts of the fellowship, we commenced our eighth cohort in February 2025. The fellowship cycle spans five arcs that are designed to meet participants where they are in their leadership journey and make their way to leadership exploration and development collectively. With this in mind, Arc 1 of this program concentrated on where we are, with a particular focus on self-exploration. It was an important moment that offered chances to deepen connections with the cohort members as well as with oneself. This two-week arc featured two live learning sessions and an orientation week full of fun activities!
Welcoming Cohort 8: Introduction to the Fellowship
Our first session, ‘Introduction to the Fellowship and Arc 1’, provided an overview of the program and introduced the team to the cohort. We understand how daunting it can be to introduce yourself in a room full of new people, whom you are virtually meeting for the first time. Keeping in mind diverse needs, the session was planned to include fun icebreakers, trust-building activities, guided prompts and fishbowl discussions that could not only engender rapport but also facilitate familiarity. These activities were conducted with an intention to create a space that holds complexities about ourselves and our identities, and not make assumptions about those around us. To otherwise say so in an OFC-esque way, we will build our community.
To provide an overview of the program and its initial roots, we invited Vandita Morarka, the visionary behind this fellowship, to deliver an exclusive keynote for the Cohort. We continued with familiarising the cohort with the structure and design of the fellowship and took a walk together through our shared Google Drive, which would act as our Polaris for the next six months to come.
This was followed by an activity where the participants made their own River of Life. Originally developed by Joyce Mercer, this activity served as a visual narrative exercise for the cohort to map their stories using a river metaphor, reflecting on their past, present, and future. If we think about it, rivers could be quite the symbolic mentors to our leadership practices. A river does not dominate; rather, it flows, moulds, and nourishes. What does this teach us about leadership practices? How can we bring about the transformation from possessing power to honouring it? The exercise used multiple prompts to assist participants to reflect, frame, guide, contextualise, and evaluate their journeys and milestone(s) that have moulded them to who they are today and who they wish to be.
The cohort was quite receptive to this exercise; it acted as “a tool for them to envision a path to a world built on social justice and care, for themselves and the society”, and also assisted in visualising barriers to help navigate these journeys. Here is an image shared by a cohort member of a cephalopod depicting their experiences of academic stress:
This activity truly fostered a creative and meaningful dialogue that celebrated the diversity and resilience of all our feminist journeys.
Post the action-packed first session, the Orientation Week included simple yet fun prompts aimed at getting participants to engage in activities at their own pace and share insights and experiences with their peers. These included prompts such as the ‘Think about it Thursday’, which encouraged participants to make a wishlist, big or small, of what they desire from the One Future Fellowship. We also had reserved a day for ‘Field Trip Fridays’ where we hopped onto the Instagram trend of the art of noticing, where participants curated visual and/or auditory documentations of their surroundings from a stroll. The idea was for participants to share about their milieus from their lenses; there are so many similarities and diversities to where we come from, and this prompt attempted to begin the unpacking of the same. We ended the Orientation Week with ‘Still Saturday,’ where we had planned to do nothing but rest and be at leisure. This was intentional because there is so much to learn and explore about leadership and social justice work, sometimes we forget about the crucial and necessary instinct of being humans: pause and rest.
Exploring who we are and what brings us to this Fellowship
The second session was about unboxing our individual and shared values to reflect on what brings us here, to the One Future Fellowship. We follow a participatory pedagogy rooted in the elements of co-creation. Given this, we revere lived expertise and invite participants to co-create and co-preserve the space with us. We thus began our second session by building a collective manifesto, a living set of guidelines that mapped our principles and values. The manifesto informs how our needs need to be met, what our expectations are, how we can create and hold a safe and brave space for each other. Some of the values brought up were safety and inclusion, empathy, compassion, respect, mutual accountability, and kindness. Everyone reflected on how they see the space we are to share for the next 6 months, being guided by these values, from accountability to conflict resolution. The discussion truly underscored the collective and helped set and reflect on ways of working and being together.
From there, we moved on to mapping our social identities and legacies to reflect on our core self, our given and chosen identities. The idea behind this activity is to use visuality to examine our intersectional identities, privileges, and oppressions associated with these identities. This also allowed for further exploration and examination of which identities are at the forefront within this program. Rooted in Kimberle Crenshaw’s and Dr. Mary John’s articulation of intersectionality, we discussed the value of bringing an intersectional lens to the work that we do and our everyday lives.
We also used the session to unpack feminisms. Unpacking the meaning of feminism is crucial to our pursuit to realise the importance of feminist leadership. In the One Future Fellowship program, we do not view feminism as purely an ideology but a framework, a social change strategy and a practice in our daily lives. We often see that the mainstream history of feminism is dominated by the colonial, Western narratives that centre the contributions and experiences of White women. However, feminism has long existed in South Asia in multiple shapes and forms. Given the specific South Asian focus of this program, it becomes important for us to explore and map the histories of feminisms within our contexts.
Panel Discussion: In Conversation with OFF Alumni
Lastly, we organised a panel discussion where we invited two of our alumni of the fellowship, Anannya Parekh and Ammaarah Nilafdeen. This panel discussion was moderated by the One Future Fellowship team and served as an opportunity to hear the stories of our alumni, what brought them to this program and the evolution of their leadership journeys. Some insights from the panel discussion were:
- Asking for help and peer support is a leadership characteristic that can actualise new possibilities.
- Creating and accessing community spaces that foster solidarity and dialogue is the fertiliser to our individual and collective growth.
- Transformations are ubiquitous and not limited to the developmental sector; reimagining should happen in all the spaces we occupy, even the ones outside of work.
- Taking and holding space for tough questions and difficult conversations is about restoring hope.
- Carry social justice with you wherever you go!
Flowing Forward: What We Learned in Arc 1
Here’s how we completed Arc 1 in the company of fun, dialogues, reflections, and learnings!
This Arc is curated to create opportunities for the cohort to interact and engage with each other, as it helps set the tone for the six-month journey ahead. It also builds a sense of ownership amongst the cohort on how they can make the best of this program. The Cohort 8 participants come from diverse backgrounds, and what brings them together is their desire to learn more about feminist leadership and social justice. Community building is the guiding force of the fellowship program, and the activities across the sessions and orientation week enabled avenues for sharing parts of ourselves with each other. This Arc has truly helped in building the foundation of trust within the cohort, and it was witnessed in how participants initiated more honest and open conversations over time. The assignments for this Arc call for participants to work in small groups of three, which we hope carries the energy further and eases some of the apprehensions that people may carry ahead of starting a program. The One Future Fellowship team truly appreciates the trust that this cohort has placed in the program and their willingness to show up for themselves.
Some of the key feedback from the participants includes reflecting on what feminism means for them, their expectations from the program, and understanding intersectionality better.
“Feminism is not a fixed or perfect ideology; it is constantly evolving as society changes. Like any movement, it adapts to new challenges, perspectives, and understandings of justice. At the same time, oppression is complex and cannot be easily quantified, as it takes many forms and affects people in different ways. Measuring inequality isn’t just about numbers— it’s about lived experiences, systemic barriers, and cultural shifts that shape how individuals navigate the world.”
— A participant’s key takeaway from the last session of Arc 1
The next Arc delves deeper into theoretical frameworks and models of feminist leadership and nudges the cohort to unpack theories to explore practising feminist leadership in their interpersonal world. We can’t wait to see and share with you what the next Arc brings. Stay tuned!
Words We Carried
And finally, here’s a little something from the heart of the cohort: a collection of quotes, thoughts, and one-liners from thinkers, facilitators, and participants alike. These gems were shared, remembered, and scribbled down during our live sessions, growing into our ever-evolving list of #ThingsHeardatOFFCohort8. Consider it a snapshot of the spirit we built together.
- “Confusion is a good friend of mine” – Munira, a cohort member of OFF.
- “Intersectionality is to name a problem, not necessarily a solution to the problem.” – Mary John
- “The cost of being a perfectionist is so real, I do feel like I can lose myself in pursuit of some imaginary ideal of my work.” – Cohort Member
- “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is- it is to imagine what is possible.” – bell hooks
- “To create is to resist complacency” – Sophia Joan