ADVISORY BOARD
THE UBUNTU CO-CREATE ADVISORY BOARD IS COMMITTED TO SUPPORTING THE VISION AND MISSION OF THE ORGANISATION WITH LOVE AND CARE AND MAKING SURE THERE IS ACCOUNTABILITY.
DR MALIKA VIRAH-SAWMYAs a child, my dream was to talk to animals and trees. I left home at 18 to be in the forest and worked for several years as a park ranger, first in Mauritius, my own island, then Seychelles, New Zealand and Madagascar.
After a PhD at the University of Oxford on human-nature conflict, I worked as a sustainability practitioner and systems scientist across the world from Asia, Australia, Africa to South America. Most of my professional work in the last 20 years focussed on sustainable agriculture, climate change adaptation and natural resource management. While the initiatives I worked on had some success, I realised the ways of thinking and doing were perpetuating control, seperation, judging, righteousness, in other words white modernity. A few years ago, I listened to my authentic dream again and founded Sensemakers Collective – to serve life. I’m still learning – not perhaps to talk to nature – but to listen to it deeply. In this calling to serve life, I shape-shift and serve as a facilitator of transformation, as an activist or rebel, as a storyteller, and as a community weaver dedicating myself to nature connection, social justice, community living, and North-South healing and reconciliation. I am learning to “garden” seeds of transformation in our ways of knowing, doing and relating with somatic systems, and ancestral wisdom practices. |