Social Reset

Reimagine

Social Reset: A New Equity Lens with Baljeet Sandhu

“If we don’t think about the knowledge that is present in all our communities we will continue to privilege the few as knowledge producers and see them as having a larger stake in how we design the future.”

In this series we’re meeting people who are shaking up the status quo, people who remind us that, in the words of the late Elijah Cummings, “we are better than this.”

Equity is the only way out of this pandemic. That’s true of all the crises we face in this new decade. Usually when we talk about equity it’s through the lens of demographics or identity – race, gender, country of origin or income. In this episode we explore a different kind of lens – knowledge equity.

Knowledge equity is the idea that expertise comes in many forms. It’s a commitment to elevate the knowledge in communities that have been left out, to value the insights that come from lived experience. Too often we see innovation as needing to come from the top down, from elites and technocrats. Knowledge equity might help us to flip the script.

Peter talks to Baljeet Sandhu, a pioneer of the lived experience leadership movement who has been awarded an MBE for Services to Equality and Civil Society. She has seen that too often the “changemakers” around the table don’t actually understand the problems they are trying to fix. And that we can’t reform our broken systems without the insights from the communities most disadvantaged by them. To address the big challenges of our time, we need to connect traditional learned and technical knowledge with lived expertise. And that’s what Baljeet does at the Centre for Knowledge Equity, which she recently founded in the UK.

Says Peter: “I love chatting with Baljeet. In our conversation about equity, inclusion and what she calls “wisdom leadership”, she managed to squeeze in a bit of quantum thinking, at least one Einstein quote and a whole lotta love.”

Reimagine is presented by Oxford Answers and the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. New episodes on Thursdays.

Featuring:

Baljeet Sandhu, CEO, Centre for Knowledge Equity.

Host:

Peter Drobac (@peterdrobac), Director of the @SkollCentre for Social Entrepreneurship, Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford.

Resources:

Centre for Knowledge Equity

Want to learn more about the show? Check out http://www.reimaginepodcast.com

Have a question for Peter? Email him at [e-mail].

Credits:

Producer/editor – Eve Streeter for Stabl

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