Voices of API Women: Kiran Ahuja on being a “young leader”

Kiran Ahuja is the Executive Director of NAPAWF and has been involved with the organization since 1999 as a national board member and co-founder of the Washington, D.C. chapter. She has practiced as a civil rights lawyer with the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division where she worked on desegregation, bilingual, race and national origin discrimination issues in education-related civil rights cases.
As a young leader and woman of color in the women’s and reproductive rights movements, I find myself in meetings with seasoned and more experienced leaders. They often emphasize how many years they have been “in the movement.� As a rite of passage or precursor to an important statement or opinion, time served has become a badge of honor in the movement. Indeed, as a young leader I understand that length of time stands for depth of conviction, expertise, commitment, and hopefully, even wisdom.
At 35, I cannot claim to be a young leader. I am positive my more youthful sisters would balk at the idea of a 35-year-old being called “young,� but that is a statement alone about the progressive women’s movement: the movement and our ideas are maturing.
That I am one of the youngest leaders in the national women’s movement is telling and highlights a serious challenge for the movement – where and when do we make room for new, young and diverse leaders, and when do we see that the inclusion of them determines the success of our movement?
Developing young and diverse leadership remains one of the foremost challenges for the progressive women’s movement. A 2003 report by the Center for the Advancement of Women, Progress and Perils: A New Agenda for Women, noted that few women belong to women’s organizations and that women of color – specifically African American (63%) and Latinas (68%)—had a strong desire for a women’s movement than Caucasian women (41%). These statistics highlight the awkward juxtaposition of a sputtering women’s movement and a growing, potent constituency who crave a movement that puts them at the center.
With the rise of national women of color organizations, an interesting phenomenon is taking place. Several of the newer organizations are being led by young women, including NAPAWF, National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, and Refugee Women’s Network, to name a few. In NAPAWF’s case, though our founding sisters are now in their 40s and 50s, they consciously stepped back and created space that allowed for young leadership. Because APA women were simply fighting for space and voice within the women’s movement, there was little fighting among ourselves for position, power and recognition. Now NAPAWF is run by young APA women, the majority of whom are 30 and under.
But starting new organizations should not be the only way to build young and diverse leadership. We have to look within our organizations to see how and whether we are genuinely cultivating leadership. What type of training do young people receive in organizations? Are they allowed to present and speak for the organization? Are they given substantive work and meaningful mentorship? And now the more difficult question: Does an executive director or top leadership have a succession plan to allow for new and young leadership? There are mantras in the movement that ask, where are all the young people, and how do we sustain a movement without “fresh blood?� My question is, where are all the young, diverse and new leaders?
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