I’m proud of it, I’m proud of my team and all that we’ve been able to achieve, but more than that, I think this work really reinforced my belief in the leadership and the goodness of people. We were bringing attention to taboo topics like female genital mutilation, getting top decision-makers to interact with citizens, and helping to bring about change on everything from road safety and pension taxes to maternal health and child protection.

We now have more than twelve million people using in India and several hundred stories of impact driven by regular people. We also started showcasing how anybody could become a changemaker.

Q: What was it like getting up and running in India?Ī: We started out trying to showcase how people can use technology to accelerate connection, reach and impact. They encouraged me to apply, and I ended up helping establish and bringing to scale in India. There are millions of problems in this world, and the solutions are going to have to come from millions of people.Īs I was playing around with that idea, a friend of mine told me about, which was just very new at the time. I am convinced that social change cannot be monopolized by a group of people or organizations and that needs to be a truly collective effort. When I grew tired of looking for solutions to huge issues like poverty on my own, I started recognizing the potential of regular citizens to be changemakers. Those experiences still drive my work and life. You had to walk about four or five kilometers to get to the closest village or town. I lived in a tribal community that had no roads, no electricity, or medical facilities. I put myself in situations that would allow me to experience the reality beyond my privilege. Q: How do you think those early experiences-your upbringing, leaving your hometown-shaped your journey to where you are today?Ī: Humbling experiences like that forced me to recognize the limitations of my capacity and privilege. I grew up being told to be a certain person behaving a certain way, and I eventually hit a phase of rebellion when I decided to move out of my hometown to Bangalore to study there. I was hungry to understand what the world was like and tried to paint a picture by piecing together the little bits I heard or saw. We hardly had newspapers, and we had one library that was not accessible. Mind you, this was before I could access the Internet. My exposure to the world around me was really limited. I have a strong connection to nature because of it, but until the age of fifteen, I wasn’t allowed out of my home other than to go to school or to go to church. I grew up in a very conservative household in an area with a lot of wildlife and nature. I don’t think I understood the depth and enormity of this, nor the influence it had on me until much later. Looking back, I was fortunate to have seen an incredibly strong woman step up to do what was needed for her family. And honestly, I just could not get along with my mom. I think I grew up seeing my mother-I didn’t fully appreciate it back then-being the person who kept my family and everything we had together and ensured that my brother and I had access to an education. I grew up in a very loving, but very low income family. Q: To start, maybe you can tell me a little bit about yourself? Where did you grow up? What is your family like?Ī: I am originally from the South of India. The organization helps users start petition campaigns that address any issue they choose-from combating patriarchy to getting more women involved in every level of decision making in their communities. When she noticed that just twenty-three percent of the platform’s users were women, Preethi created She Creates Change to help more women become social change champions and leaders in their community. Five years ago, Preethi established the platform in India as part of the Foundation, a sister organization to that uses the platform in global south countries to build citizen-led social movements on a regional, national and international level. She founded the She Creates Change program at the Foundation in India to unite people around her country and beyond to drive for that change-and to keep women’s leadership at the forefront of it.Ĭ is a global petitions company designed to empower a generation of first-time leaders to take action in their communities.

When Preethi Herman left her hometown in Southern India, she discovered that there are millions of problems in the world-but just as many people to solve them. Unleashing the Power of Women Preethi Herman

A time for change foundation