Chitra Aiyar

Connector, Educator/Teacher, Idea generator, Lawyer, Parent, Potential employer

Chitra Aiyar is Executive Director of Sadie Nash Leadership Project a feminist social justice youth leadership program that supports over 700 low-income young women of color in New York City and Newark each year to lead lives in committed pursuit of joy and liberation for themselves and their communities. Prior to joining Sadie Nash, she was Senior Staff Attorney at African Services Committee, representing Harlem residents and African and Caribbean immigrant communities at the intersection of poverty, HIV, and migration. Before becoming an attorney, Chitra worked in international development at Grameen Foundation USA, supporting replications of the Grameen Bank microcredit model in East Africa and India and was a Fulbright Scholar in Bangladesh researching access to education for poor rural girls at BRAC, the world's largest and most successful non-formal primary education program. She has taught at various women's prisons, high schools, and founded the U.C. Berkeley-based People's Test Preparation Service (an organization providing free SAT classes and seeking to disrupt the standardized test industry that was awarded the Presidential Service Award by Bill Clinton in 1995). Chitra has worked in radio as one of the hosts of Asia Pacific Forum, a show that covers progressive issues in Asia and Asian-America on WBAI 99.5 FM and in film as co-producer of Claiming Our Voice, a short documentary on Queens-based migrant domestic workers engaging in art and activism. She has been an adjunct professor at Hunter College, Teachers College/Columbia University, and New York Law School teaching courses ranging from gender and migration to human rights in sub-Saharan Africa to negotiation skills for attorneys. Chitra is on the boards of Law @t the Margins and the Asian Women's Giving Circle. She was born and raised in the Bay Area and now makes her home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn with her partner and two children.

public libraries, the subway, social dance, idea parties, breakfast think-ins, Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process and how to apply it to college classrooms or really any type of learning environment, the Free Black Women's Library, participatory action research, mapping, paying taxes, the Clemente course, Bard Prison Initiative and adult education initiatives generally, state-subsidized childcare, making caregiving a highly skilled, highly compensated profession, housing court, This is Us, James Baldwin

This is my first time. I'm thrilled to be here.

standardized tests, bananagrams