Anj Handa Speaking Topics
For over 20 years, Anj Handa has worked at the intersection of equality, leadership and structural change: as a professional lobbyist, governance specialist, consultant, community builder and speaker.
Anj is the Founder of Inspiring Women Changemakers (IWC), a community and consultancy working toward a world that is safer and fairer for women and other marginalised people.
Her work is grounded in a single, unfashionable conviction: that women’s inequality is not a pipeline problem or a cultural inconvenience. It is a structural failure, reproduced through the design of organisations, boards and institutions that were not built with women in mind, and have not been adequately redesigned since.
Anj has recently updated us on her new speaking topics
KEYNOTE TALKS
All keynotes can be tailored to your audience and objectives. Anj also delivers bespoke board development sessions, leadership workshops and staff training.
Who’s Missing, and What It Costs
When women, and particularly women whose identities compound that exclusion, are consistently absent from leadership, it is not only a fairness failure. It is a design failure. This keynote makes the structural case for women’s representation from the impact outward: what happens to decision-making quality, risk assessment, organisational culture and long-term resilience when the people closest to the issues are furthest from the decisions. Honest about the barriers. Clear about what better looks like. Designed to leave audiences with a compelling picture of what becomes possible, not just what is currently missing.
The Labyrinth, Not the Ceiling
The glass ceiling is the wrong metaphor, and it has been pointing organisations in the wrong direction for decades. The barriers women navigate are not one dramatic obstacle at the top. They are a complex, intersecting set of structural and cultural conditions that operate at every level, and they affect different women differently depending on race, disability, age and other factors. This keynote names those conditions clearly, examines what organisations are inadvertently building in, and shows what a better-designed route looks like. Grounded in Anj’s own experience of navigating institutions as a British Indian woman in governance, and in two decades of practice helping organisations see what they have designed without noticing.
Collective Power: How Changemakers Move the World
Rooted in the founding story of IWC and two decades of watching what happens when people bring their skills, networks and courage together in service of a shared purpose. This talk is about the practical and political power of collective action: how to build coalitions across difference, how to use narrative to shift power, and why the most important thing any changemaker can do is stop working alone. Story-rich, energising and designed to leave people with a clearer sense of their own capacity to contribute, and of the community of people doing this work alongside them.
Leading Through Backlash: Staying Brave, Strategic and Well
For leaders and changemakers navigating a political and cultural moment in which progressive values are being actively contested. Draws on Anj’s own experience of leading high-profile campaigns under pressure, and on two decades of observing what sustains movements and what burns them out. Practical, honest and grounded in what people are actually facing right now. This is not a talk about resilience as self-management. It is a talk about strategy, community and the long
“Anj was the keynote speaker at an important event and I could not have been happier with her contribution. She was a true professional, radiating calmness and putting others at ease. She has a lovely, relaxed approach whilst simultaneously taking the subject matter very seriously. Most importantly, attendees were genuinely inspired, including one who said the event had opened his eyes to the need for change.”Catherine Seymour, Association for Charitable Foundations
For more information on Anj please visit her webpage or email us on enquiries@scampspeakers.co.uk