Azita Ardakani launched Lovesocial – a communications agency based in Vancouver, BC – in 2009 after spending over 2 years volunteering on online impact initiatives. With a background in Sociology from Simon Fraser University, Canada, Azita has always applied the lens of human drivers to her online marketing career. Staying committed to Lovesocial’s mandate of authentic marketing strategies, Azita has forged a new kind of entrepreneurship which mixes profit with purpose. She is the youngest female founder of the B Corporation model alongside the ranks of Patagonia, Etsy and Method.

Zainab Salbi, a celebrated humanitarian, author, and journalist, co-founder of DaughtersforEarth.org, “Chief Awareness Officer” at FindCenter.com, and host of the Redefined podcast, founded Women for Women International, an organization to help women survivors of conflicts, when she was 23, and built the group from helping 30 women to reaching nearly half a million and raising tens of millions of dollars to help them and their families rebuild their lives. The author of several books, including the bestseller, Between Two Worlds and, most recently, Freedom Is an Inside Job, she is also the creator and host of several TV shows, including #MeToo, Now What? on PBS.

Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers and its Chief Relationship Strategist is also co-founder of Women Bridging Worlds and Connecting Women Leading Change. She co-edited the anthology book, Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart, and most recently wrote Nature, Culture & The Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership. An award-winning social entrepreneur, Nina teaches and speaks internationally, and previously served as President of Seeds of Change and Director of Strategic Marketing for Odwalla.

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NINA SIMONS: Welcome. The fundamental question we wanted to explore together today is: How are women around the world leading movements demanding change from oppressive and destructive systems, and what might we learn from these movements?

The three of us are approaching this conversation with a multi-dimensional lens, looking at both the concrete actions women leaders are taking and the inner work that’s needed to cultivate ourselves to become feminine-centered or heart-centered leaders of change. We want to look at the outer and the inner, recognizing that we’re all deconditioning ourselves and exploring emerging archetypes to replace the old, outmoded ones that are no longer serving us.

We all carry “masculine” and “feminine” aspects within ourselves, but because of the ages-old, deep-in-our-psyches biases about gender that exist around the world that are reflected in millions of ways, this exploration can serve us all as we aim toward a future that’s equitable, healthy, regenerative and liberatory for all people and all of our Earth community.

I have been in a 25-year exploration about how being in a female body has affected my leadership, and what I can do to peel away the layers of conditioning that keep me small or complicit, or untrue to my truest self. I’ve tried to do that in a number of ways. I’ve written a couple of books about it. I’ve convened women for explorations and leadership work together, and the more I looked at global trends around women leading change, the more convinced I became that as more women ascend into leadership at all levels and all sectors of society, everything benefits, the whole system improves – the economy, the land, the water, the food, everything. 

But there’s a tremendous amount of work left to do. When I was invited to speak on a panel at a UN Commission on the Status of Women event about women and extractive industries, we heard from women from all over the world who told us stories about the extraordinary levels of violence and exploitation women were subjected to in frontline communities, so we have to do everything in our power to support their struggles.

ZAINAB SALBI: I was born and raised in Iraq, and a major thing that defined my life was the Iran/Iraq War, and for a long time I’ve wanted to be in dialogue with a woman from the other side of that war, Iran. It’s very emotional for me because when I was growing up, Iran was the enemy, but we evolve in time, and here we are, Azita and I, at the same table, working together in unity in so many ways for women around the world. 

During that war, when I was a child, all the news we saw on TV was from a man’s perspective, all about the weapons, the tanks, the planes, etc., but all the people in my life were women – my mom, my teachers, my doctors, even the police. I came to realize that there are two sides of war: there’s a frontline which is mostly fought by men, but there’s a backline of war that is led by women, and that is an ignored story. It is women who keep life going in the midst of war.

I ended up working in wars for 20 years of my life as the founder of Women for Women International, and I saw that it was women who despite the bombings and all the horrors of war, sustain life, but they’re not incorporated in the decisions and negotiations of making peace, or in the definitions of what peace is. I remember interviewing a Southern Sudanese woman who had to keep walking during the entire Sudanese civil war because she and her family had to escape constantly. I asked her: “How do you define peace?” And she said: “Peace means the regrowing of my toenails” because she walked so much that all her toenails fell apart. Women see peace and war from a different perspective.

I started Women for Women International, an organization that works with women survivors of wars, and I became obsessed in my studies and in all my professional work about the role of women in wars and in leading revolutionary and liberation movements historically. I studied a lot of revolutionary movements, particularly from the part of the world that I come from, the Middle East.

Women have always played major roles in all liberation, revolutionary and anti-colonial movements in the region from Algerian independence to the Palestinian struggle to the “Arab Spring.” The revolution I studied the most is the Algerian anti-colonial movement in the 1950s and 60s against French colonialism. Women famously smuggled weapons and messages under their chadors. In the Palestinian liberation movement, women ignited the first Intifada and played a major in both intifadas. But throughout all these movements women are always told you need to prioritize the national liberation. Women want national liberation to include their liberation as women and equal rights, but they are always told to put these rights on the side as we focus on the fight for national liberty. 

And nearly every single time, when a national liberation fight succeeded, the patriarchy reasserted itself and told women go back home and play their traditional roles. Revolutionary leaders would take over from oppressive leaders only to become oppressive leaders themselves. Over and over again, they betray women and say go back to your domestic sphere and have children. But we have proof that actually in those rare cases when women are included in peace negotiations or in shaping political changes, those peace plans and social changes turn out to be more sustainable and more popular. One clear example of an exception to the usual patriarchal pattern was in the South African anti-apartheid movement. Not only did women play a major role in that movement but women’s rights became an important part of the new constitution.

And the West is far from innocent in all this because in many cases in Asia and Africa the colonial powers actually made gender roles even more oppressive and eroded those freedoms that women and sexual minorities had traditionally enjoyed. And during the American administration of Iraq after the second Gulf War, women were excluded from political leadership even more than they had been before the war. It’s true that the status of women improved in some parts of Afghanistan during the American occupation, but that’s only because the Taliban were and are so incredibly oppressive to women, something that wasn’t the norm in Afghanistan in the 20^th Century. In the 70s, some urban Afghani women were professionals and went to clubs and wore short skirts, if they wanted to. 

And during the evacuation from Afghanistan women leaders whose names were on Taliban assassination lists—teachers, parliamentarians, journalists—were not prioritized. There was no political will by any country to focus on the evacuation of Afghan women leaders. We organized a private effort of women from all over the world and raised about $15 million in 2 weeks and chartered our own planes. We did not sleep for a month, but we ended up evacuating 350 women and 1500 of their family members into Albania. Most of them were relocated to Canada, some to Europe, but the U.S. only took 20. 20! The betrayal of women is a constant. We get thrown under the bus almost every single time. That Afghani episode was a wake-up call for me and a lot of my American feminist friends who worked on this evacuation effort. We were elated at this amazing, historic women-run operation we had pulled off, but we also felt what a slap in the face this abandonment of women leaders was. 

We felt very betrayed, but I feel that these constant betrayals and assaults are bringing a wide range of women activists closer together in more unity and solidarity. I feel that something has fundamentally shifted in the last year. What has taken place in Iran in the last year is truly historic, whatever its short-term outcome. A new trajectory for a new women’s history and a new women’s story in which women’s liberation is at the center of any and all liberation movements is being born.

AZITA ARDAKANI: It’s a special sort of its own revolution to be sitting here with a woman ally when our childhood stories could easily have made us hate each other. It’s really powerful.

I’m Azita. I was born in Iran. I migrated to Canada, which was and has been my home for many years. My mother getting us out of the country was its own form of revolutionary act, a threshold act, choosing to move into the unknown. There are moments when large groups of people are willing to take huge risks to push for a better future, and they are willing to take those risks, and they just ask our support and to be seen and heard. And it is such a failure to not seize those moments to offer that support. It’s a shared collective opportunity, and we would be just so short-sighted not to get behind, in this instance, the Iranian women. They’re meeting violent reaction with their bodies, and all they ask is that we show up in whatever small revolutionary way we can.

I have a spiritual practice, and a lot of my time is spent asking: What is mine to do? Because many of the problems in this world just seem so overwhelming, and I feel paralyzed often about what is mine to do, but in this case the call came from the Iranian women, and our job was to respond, so a group of us embarked on a project. We worked to remove the Islamic republic from the Commission on the Status of Women. We were told by experts there was no mechanism to do it, but we decided to try anyways, and with the support of incredible organizations and allies and friends we were able to accomplish it in 10 weeks. When something wants to be birthed, it happens. They are rare moments, and it’s important to listen and be attuned to when it’s the right time to push and be good midwives to those moments when there’s an opening and change can happen much faster and more efficiently and elegantly than we think. 

This felt important, but it was a small win given the dire situation of the women and girls of Iran. And a lot of our Afghani sisters came to us and asked “What about us?” They feel deeply forgotten in all this. Iran’s gotten the limelight, so less than a month ago, a group of Afghan and Iranian lawyers and legal practitioners teamed together to launch a campaign on March 8^th, which is International Women’s Day. 

The laws that bind us are ultimately words made of stories, and laws and stories can bind us but also be used to free us, so these incredible, brilliant group of women are using the concept of apartheid and seeking to expand its legal definition to include gender apartheid. 

In less than a month we’re already seeing incredible progress, and this is an entirely community-led effort by Afghan and Iranian women collaborating to use the laws that oppress them, to try to use that pathway to liberate themselves. It’s a wonder to watch. It feels like a revolutionary act in and of itself.

I also really believe in the role of the arts. Yes, it was important to remove the Islamic Republic from the Commission on the Status of Women, which required a lot of politics and politicking, but it was also the arts that I think really freed up a whole other dimension of the imagination to see things through a part of ourselves that we don’t usually activate when we’re talking about revolution.

ZAINAB: What’s exciting about that story to me is its reconfiguring of alliances among women. In my professional career, we’ve been focused on building big bridges between American and European women and women in other parts of the world—North/South bridges. What this is doing is building South/South bridges. That alliance between Afghan and Iranian women, for example, is a model of reconfiguring the women’s movement, and it can shift the dynamics of many things – alliance-building, funding, political coordination. It’s very exciting. 

But that reconfiguration can also entail some discomfort, and it has to be handled with love and sensitivity. On the one hand, it is very important for American women to continue to be involved in supporting women in other parts of the world. A complaint from activists from all over the world during the Trump era was: “We know your country is going through a painful moment, but please don’t forget about us, don’t just drop us from your awareness.” It was very painful because financing to activists overseas dropped a lot.

So, as we’re fighting for women’s rights in America, as we must because we’re losing so many rights here, we can’t forget about the necessity and the need – emotional, financial, physical – to continue that alliance and the support of each other and of other women in the Global South. And yet, the global women’s movement is no longer centered on American women. For a long time, American women shaped the narrative and defined what women’s rights mean, what liberty means. Now women from many countries are defining their own contexts for struggles. It’s an exciting moment.

I call myself a bridge builder, advocating for both big bridges and small bridges, because big bridges are not enough; they’re important but not enough. Sometimes small bridges are more effective. We all have to breathe through this birthing of a new process, a new manifestation, a new era of a women’s movement, as we are all fighting for women’s rights all over the world, because at the moment we’re losing ground very fast in a way we hadn’t expected 10 years ago, even. We were celebrating our inevitable progress 10 years ago.

We have to face the fact that it is a dark time, especially but not only in the Middle East. It’s a dark moment in history, but I believe that in that darkness, women are the lights. I really believe the light is going to come from women. I’m betting that it is the women who are going to lead these changes and revolutions, as Iranian women have started doing. I have to keep that hope, but we have to keep feeding that light because it won’t shine on its own.

NINA: Researchers who wrote the book Women, Sex and World Peace argued that gender bias is the deepest bias in the human psyche, deeper than faith or race or anything else, and I’ve come to believe that it may well be true. We are living with a legacy of gender violence and bias that is so deep from the Burning Times in medieval Europe to the mass rapes so frequent in wars to the brutality and genocides of colonialism that so often impact women and girls disproportionately. How can we not carry that in our bones? 

I had an experience 10 or 12 years ago in a very, very long ritual with a Peruvian elder, and at the very end of this ritual he said if you remember only one thing from this experience, remember this: “Consciousness creates matter, language creates reality, ritual creates relationship,” so I was struck as I heard you describe both your campaigns with how strategically you are being culture transformers, including in the way that you have targeted language to change the culture. I am of the belief that if we don’t change our culture, we’re sunk. We can do all the strategic interventions and all the financial stuff and everything else, but the culture is what’s driving it all, and so I just really bow in admiration for the way that you have received the insight of what wanted to be born when. 

I was just recently with a dear friend and teacher to me named Pat McCabe. Many of you may know her as Woman Stands Shining. She talked about how when her son came back from Standing Rock, he learned something fundamental there, which she will be forever grateful for, which is that the men should never initiate any action that involves possible loss of life or great danger without consulting with the elder women first. I thought of this when I heard Azita mention that many men have joined with the women in the streets in the protests in Iran, and in order for our movements to succeed, we will need the support of a number of men. How do you think we can make that happen?

AZITA: I can’t pretend to know why the men rose up alongside the women.There do seem to be mysterious breakthrough moments when the collective is able to suddenly see things in a new way, and that goes beyond anything I can understand or attempt to describe, but I think that the feminine ethic inside of men also wants to be liberated. I don’t believe men want their traditional way of being. It’s just not a humane or satisfying way to move through the world, so one reason men may be joining in this uprising against the oppression of women, whether they’re aware of it or not, is because the feminine ethic within them yearns for liberation from the sort of dominant attitudes and behaviors that patriarchic societies expect of them, but that just don’t feel good, for any human. 

As Mother Earth is crying out to us, there’s a collective call and response going on inside ourselves, and women are more aware of it in general, but it’s inside men also, and some of them feel it strongly and want another way of being. When they see women lead in that way, something in them arises too, and a desire for shared liberation emerges. It might be a women-led revolution, but there is also a feminine-led revolution inside quite a few men, and we need to be aware of it and help it come forward. 

ZAINAB: I have worked in many war zones, as I mentioned, from Bosnia to Rwanda to the Congo to Southern Sudan, and I always encountered some men in the population, even in the most conservative societies, who saw the oppression of women clearly and understood how unfair it was. I met a religious leader in a very traditional part of southern Iraq whose help I needed to gain safe passage for our work with women, and he said: “We can’t thrive when women in our society are like a broken wing; a society cannot fly if one of its wings is clipped.” Even some militia leaders I met understood it.

I went to Mosul two weeks after Isis was overthrown. Just about everything was destroyed, and I spoke to all sorts of people from garbage collectors and policemen to housewives and teachers, and they were all saying the same thing, basically: “We need a new human being. Every group came and promised us money and power if we would only kill these people, the Shia, then the Kurds, or the Christians, or the Yazidis, and we tried it all, and it failed us. This promise of money and power did not come true. We need a new human being with new ways of thinking.” I think many people can see that the false premises and promises that come with capitalism and colonialism and ethnic hatred are all falling apart, and many people are ready for a new awakening, a new story, and big changes in gender roles have to be a very big part of that story.

Audience Question: How can one know what the right thing to do is and how to choose the right time to act?

AZITA: Janine Benyus said that life needs two things to survive—sunlight and clear signals of communication, but our ability to hear and sense what’s happening is under threat because of the digital static we now swim in. It robs us of our capacity for genuine attention, so it’s harder than ever to actually listen to our instructions, but we have to try. For me, I look for a sense of intense aliveness that’s bigger than me when I start down a path. If I get that feeling, then I know I should be doing that. If there isn’t that aliveness in me, it’s probably not the right thing. To do work that sustains and fulfills me these days, I try hard to listen and to feel if something feels vitally alive both in me and beyond me. Is there a greater chorus of collaboration guiding it?

Audience Question: Do you have any advice about how to collaborate effectively?

NINA: To work together better, I think we have to slow down, and we have to prioritize collaboration. We have to decide that it’s imperative for our survival and our thriving, but, in my experience, collaboration takes time and patience. You really have to invest in building relationships and giving them time to mature enough for anything to come through. I think we have to be more process-oriented and slow down. The capitalist culture says do more, do it faster, produce, produce, produce, but I don’t think we can do that and collaborate well.

The other key element is nurturing feminine-based human values. We all have masculine and feminine values and orientations within us, but deeply ingrained cultural patterns have made us inherit a predisposition toward patriarchal values and approaches, whether we are conscious of it or not, so I try to resist my tendency to take on too much and to drive myself too hard and to not give myself adequate time to rest and integrate and receive. 

It’s really a deep pattern in my life, as it seems to be for many of us, regardless of the gendered body we may be in. But I’m trying hard to be aware of it and get beyond my conditioning. I would like to have a full spectrum of all kinds of gendered realities and options within myself available at any time. That’s what I aspire to, and I want to learn to lead more from my heart than my head, but it’s not easy. It will probably take me all my lifetime, but there’s nothing I’d rather do. There’s nothing more joyful than shedding layer after layer of that onion skin.

I also think we could have a lot less violence in the world if everyone had a chance to express anger and despair and grief. We don’t have adequate places and ways to do that well in our culture, and it would be much easier to collaborate if we had a chance to express our grief productively and effectively, so we wouldn’t be carrying all that unexpressed pain into our work and relationships.

ZAINAB: I want to be honest. I’ve been in so many collaborations with women, and it’s not always nice. We all have a shadow side, and I don’t believe that if women led the world, it would automatically be a better world. The good, the bad, and the ugly exist in all of us, in women and in men, and I care about the qualities of the individuals who are leading. I do believe in equality and diversity, and if we have more diverse leaders in the world, it will definitely be a better world, but I’ve dealt with all kinds of female leadership, and it’s not always positive, so I won’t support a woman to lead just because she’s a woman.

In the old mode of female leadership, there were so few seats at the table, we had to elbow each other in order to fight for the one seat at the table. Right now, I’m not going to fight for the one seat. We need 50% of the seats, so let’s fight for 50% of the seats, not the one seat. In an earlier era, women had to be tough to have any chance of being heard, but now, if we are trying to balance between our ability to hear and our ability to be joyful, we’ve got to find a new path for collaboration that doesn’t involve leading with our egos. This involves doing the inner work of becoming comfortable with and seeing clearly the totality of who we are, our light and our shadow both. If we can do that, that will lead to successful collaborations.

Also, one last thought: my mother used to tell me that when the artist dies, all else dies. The artist carries the last frontier, so maintaining and supporting and acknowledging the artists among us is a crucially important part of every movement.