Deepa Narayan

Deepa Narayan Ph.D is an innovative thinker and disrupter who has worked on issues of poverty, gender and self-empowerment for 25 years. She lived in villages working with NGOs around the world for a decade before joining the World Bank in Washington D.C. where she was Senior Adviser on poverty reduction and poor people’s empowerment. She trained for 15 years in body-based emotional healing and conducts workshops with youth and adults. 

 A winner of many awards, she was named one of the top 100 Disruptive Heroes by Hacking Work and one of the top 100 Global Thinkers, by Foreign Policy Magazine. She is the author of 17 books including the seminal series Voices of the Poor A prolific writer and TED speaker, her most recent decade of open-ended research on gender has resulted in three seminal pieces, a book, Chup: Breaking the Silence of India’s Women: a podcast celled What’s A Man, and a new conceptual framework that refines the World Bank’s Gender Strategy. Deepa  currently lives part time on Cortes Island where she also serves as the Vice Chair of the Hollyhock Board. She helped create the Cortes Island Foundation and works on affordable housing issues.