Deepa Narayan

Dr. Deepa Narayan is an innovative thinker and disrupter who has worked on issues of poverty, gender and self-empowerment for the last 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.

After training for 15 years in body based emotional healing, she conducts workshops with youth, women and mixed gender groups. She currently lives part time on Cortes Island where she also serves on the Hollyhock Board as Vice-Chair. She helped co-create the Cortes Island Foundation and works on affordable housing issues.

She is the founder of Chup Circles to spread compassionate deep conversations across genders for gender peace.

A winner of many awards, including named one of the top 100 Disruptive Heroes by Hacking Work and 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, the last decade of open-ended research on gender has resulted in three seminal pieces: a book, Chup: Breaking the Silence of India’s Women; What’s A Man: Exploring Masculinity in India podcast; and a new conceptual framework, which draws on Adam Kahane’s work focusing on power, love and joy to refine the World Bank’s Gender Strategy.