Sowing the Seeds of Global Change

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Kavita Ramdas '85 Funds Women to Promote a Better World

When Kavita Ramdas '85, president and CEO of the Global Fund for Women, says that standing with women who are making peace, challenging injustice, and creating change is her organization's everyday work, she means it literally. The San Francisco-based Global Fund, founded in 1987, is the largest grant-making foundation in the world focusing exclusively on women's rights outside the United States. It has awarded over $31 million to more than 2,200 groups in 160 countries, groups working to protect women from violence, increase girls' access to education, and improve economic opportunities.

Born in India, Ramdas was drawn to social work as a teenager and dropped out of college to volunteer at a small farm in the Indian state of Bihar. Working there alongside an elderly farmer, she received some life-changing advice: "He told to me go use my education and compassion to make a bigger difference. He urged me to tell the world about his community’s struggles. I suddenly understood that the advantages I'd been given could be used to help others on a much larger scale." Kavita returned to college, earning a bachelor's degree from Mount Holyoke and a master's from Princeton.

While Ramdas was committed from an early age to helping the poor and disadvantaged, she believes that her experience at Mount Holyoke "gave me the confidence in myself at a time when I was unsure and searching for direction. It opened a whole world of strong women achievers to me, from math professors to crew members who were my roommates."