Dr. Neha Kagal Trustee

Neha is an intersectional feminist activist and researcher with over twenty years of experience working with women’s rights organizations and grassroots movements towards gender justice. A passionate believer in the power of organising, Neha’s feminist beginnings were nurtured within the women’s movement in India (where she grew up), particularly through her years working with trade unions of wastepickers and sex-workers. The process of ‘becoming a brown woman’ through the experiences of migration deepened her engagement with movements for minoritised women's rights and racial justice. At present Neha works in the development sector as the Deputy Director of (Decolonising) Programmes and Fundraising for ActionAid UK where she leads strategic thinking around building solidarity between donors and the communities they seek to resource.

Prior to this, she worked with Imkaan, a Black feminist ending-VAWG organisation, where she led a landmark action-research-policy project on Intersectionality and VAWG rooted in the lives of Roma, queer, disabled and refugee women across the Western Balkans and Turkey. As a consultant, Neha works with INGOs, CSOs, bilateral and multilateral institutions both as a thematic ‘expert’ on intersectional gender justice and as an advocate for decolonising aid and philanthropy. Neha has taught at LSE and SOAS, and is a guest lecturer at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Neha is passionate about bringing in a ‘healing ethic’ to our work and attributes her ongoing un/learning to a lineage of Black/Brown/Bahujan/Queer Buddhist teachers. She is an alumnus of the award-winning Practice in Transformative Action (PiTA) programme at the East Bay Meditation Centre, Oakland and a member of the Otherness and Belonging Institute. She is also a Trustee of the Unforgotten Fund.