South Asian Americans
Leading Together

To our SAALT community,

After 24 years in existence, South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) will be dissolving as an organization and sunsetting at the end of 2024. 

The organization’s history is well documented and archived on the SAALT website and with the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA). A detailed timeline of our history will continue to live here.

OVERVIEW

2000 - 2013

SAALT started as a leadership development organization in 2000 for South Asian Americans. 

Following 9/11, the organization changed its mission to focus on protecting the civil rights of all South Asians. This was in response to the interpersonal and state violence aimed at American Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities. We filled a critical need at the national level of protecting South Asian communities in the wake of violent backlash following 9/11, using federal policy and advocacy as our primary strategies, in partnership with longstanding, local and regional South Asian organizations.

2014 - 2024

In the last 10 years, SAALT began shifting its work more explicitly towards racial justice, in response to the police brutality of Sureshbhai Patel in Alabama and the rising Black Lives Matter movement. We began challenging the systems and structures of racism upheld by our government through federal policy. 

In the last 5 years, we have come to understand that our work to address injustice needs to be informed by our own ancient homegrown oppression: caste. Caste is an identity marker that shapes all South Asians and is the oldest barrier to organizing across a deep diversity of South Asian communities. Even with a racial justice framework, we realized we did not have the capacity to fully serve the vast majority of South Asians, because we were lacking an analysis of caste.

The way other racialized communities in the U.S. have been able to come together and organize does not necessarily reflect a trajectory that our communities can adopt. Today, there is much wider recognition (thanks to the tremendous work of Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi communities), that the Hindutva movement, rooted in caste oppression, is the greatest threat to the well-being of all South Asian communities. Building the power to dismantle the magnitude of this force requires a commitment to becoming anti-caste through study, struggle, and relational building on the basis of caste. We felt called to practice a culturally appropriate, distinctly South Asian justice framework, which required us to shift towards an anti-caste cultural strategy. 

SAALT’S ARC OF TRANSFORMATION (2014 - 2024)

Ten years ago, SAALT began intentionally assessing the organization’s programming and policy change work through surveys, program evaluations, check-ins with partner organizations, and internal staff feedback. Overall, these assessments revealed the need for an evolution in SAALT’s vision, mission, and values.

In 2019, SAALT underwent a challenging but necessary leadership transition. The remaining staff inherited a major lack of investment in administrative infrastructure, as well as fractured relationships with partners and funders. This is when all of SAALT’s historic programming ended – the biennial South Asian Summit, the Young Leaders Institute, and We Build Community regranting program. To address the impact of this major crisis point – both internally and on our partners – we updated our vision, mission, and values. We attempted to shift our programming and rebuild the organization for the next three years, all without pausing.

This included:

1. organizing internal trainings on caste supremacy led by Equality Labs;
2. co-hosting the first-ever congressional briefing on caste in the U.S. in partnership with Equality Labs;
3. supporting local organizing efforts to free detained South Asian asylum seekers, many who were facing life threatening danger in India for opposing Modi’s government; and working to build a pipeline of legal and language interpretation assistance for the growing number of detained South Asian migrants in the U.S.;
4. ending our data collection and analysis of individual incidents of hate violence to focus on the root causes of this violence stemming from our federal policies;
5. initiating efforts to reshape and align the National Coalition of South Asian Organizations (NCSO), after knowing for years that some groups in the coalition supported the spying, surveillance, and doxxing of other members.

During this time, we were confronted with the reality that as our leadership, values, and policy work became more progressive, our access to the federal decision making spaces we once participated in was revoked. We were no longer being regularly invited to influence federal policy on immigration and hate violence. In addition, we were no longer willing to work in coalitions with Hindutva serving organizations. We began to question if federal policy reform could continue to be our theory of change.

SAALT historically focused on South Asians in the U.S. and did not take into account the dramatic political, cultural, and social shifts happening in South Asia and the diaspora. We needed to understand the impact of policies in our countries of origin, the movements responding to them, and the impact of both on our populations in the U.S. The container we needed to do this kind of work required an anti-caste analysis. We tried to balance learning, changing, and implementing new programs. As a result, we faced high staff turnover and burnout, interpersonal conflict, and administrative challenges.

Up to this point, SAALT did not have cultural practices to build our internal alignment,  understand our contradictions, and inform how we move the work. And, yet we were experiencing the cultural pressure to produce programs as a national nonprofit responding to multiple crises.

We recognized the enduring identity crisis of being a historically high caste South Asian nonprofit. We could not keep reprogramming our work, without first addressing caste at the level of self, staff, and board.

JUST TRANSITION + CHRYSALIS

“It makes sense that in 2020, when the world paused for a moment, SAALT too was turning inward to ask, ‘Who are we and what is our role in seeking liberation?’ What we came away with is that we know we have to center an anti-caste analysis to even begin to understand the impact we want to make.” – SAALT board member

In 2022, SAALT’s staff and a newly reconstituted board asked ourselves: what would becoming anti-caste look and feel like? In response, we initiated a Just Transition to become an anti-caste institution.

STRUCTURAL SHIFTS

We decided to practice internally what we were beginning to learn from the anti-caste work of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar: that cultural change and social reform must precede any lasting political and economic reform. We did this by beginning to make specific structural shifts within the organization.

New Values

The first shift was to create a caste-centered values framework. This framework helped us understand how our other values (such as racial justice, gender justice, and disability justice) are informed by an anti-caste lens, and vice versa. We voted to focus our efforts on building an analysis of caste between board and staff to inform our internal practices first, before experimenting further with federal policy and advocacy on behalf of South Asian American communities. 

Shared Leadership

In 2023, we became an organization led by a team of four co-directors, accountable to our board. In total, we called ourselves the SAALT ecosystem, the collective stewarding this massive internal shift for the organization. Learning from the past, we voted to cease any remaining external programming and enter into a period of chrysalis in 2023. We met with our funders, completed any remaining deliverables and reports, and ceased solicitation of donations. We needed a full pause to deeply cleanse and emerge with clarity. SAALT as it was – with its rapid response work and internal crises – inhibited the contemplative space we needed to study caste, shift the consciousness of our leadership, and begin practicing new ways of being, from the inside out. 

Our co-directorship consisted of: one queer nonbinary high caste person and dog parent in her early 30s with roots in Durham, West Bengal, and Bangladesh; a Dalit woman, immigrant, and single mom in her early 50s from South India making home in the Deep South; a high caste woman and mom in her early 40s with roots in Atlanta and Tamil Nadu; and a high caste woman and dog parent in her late 30s with roots in Baltimore, Pakistan, and Punjab. This was the first time in SAALT's history that the majority of the staff was representing the U.S. South and the first time a Dalit person was on the leadership team.

Fist to Five Decision Making

In an effort to both acknowledge organizational hierarchy and engage in values aligned decision-making, we adopted a fist to five decision-making practice. We thank our conflict transformation coach, rusia mohiuddin, for helping us land on this practice. It enabled us to signal clearly when we arrived at a decision point and work toward consensus among the four co-directors until everyone could be at a 5 or in total agreement with a proposed decision. This was instrumental in building trust, moving through conflict, and making timely choices. And, it was a critical step toward shifting away from a crisis response culture that prioritized quick responses and heavy compromises.  

Salary Transparency

For the first time in SAALT’s history, we removed the ban on discussing salaries and made staff salaries fully transparent. We also created an equitable salary scale to significantly reduce the gap between the lowest paid and highest paid staff member. We are grateful to The Highlander Research and Education Center for providing the framework for this practice. 

CULTURAL AND RELATIONAL SHIFTS

This chrysalis period was a very mutative time for SAALT, which brought up collective anxiety and fear in each of us. We were frequently reminded of how valuable the investment in building deep relationships with each other was to sustaining this work and our bonds. 

One way we did this was through a story circle practice, a form of heart-centered storytelling, created by John O’Neal, a co-founder of the Free Southern Theater. We often opened our retreat time with this practice and listened to each person share their origin story. Making intentional time to hear each other’s stories over the course of two years generated space within our collective body to hold each other’s humanity and feel into the dynamism of our group. Caste oppression has manifested by keeping us deeply divided for thousands of years. It was no small thing to be building across our caste histories. This practice helped us build trust and made space for our multiple truths, discomforts, curiosities, contradictions, and doubts to co-exist. 

As an ecosystem, we committed to monthly political education sessions to build and embody our analysis of becoming anti-caste. For over a year, we read the seminal essay, Annihilation of Caste (AoC) by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. We believe this is a foundational text for understanding the caste system and Dr. Ambedkar’s leadership in the anti-caste movement. 

Political education gave us a space to explore, reflect, and stretch our analysis of power. It informed how we were becoming a more values-aligned body, that was deepening our cultural understanding of our South Asianness through caste. We are deeply grateful to Baba Saheb, Periyar, Phule, the articulators and culture creators at Round Table India, Savari, Prabuddha, Shared Mirror, Sanghamitra, and Rap Toli for seeding and growing our anti-caste analysis.

Prior to chrysalis, the SAALT ecosystem worked with Dr. Khalid Anis Ansari, a Pasmanda Muslim scholar, who led us in a year-long six part series on caste, religion, and class with a focus on Islam. We are thankful to Dr. Ansari for opening our eyes to Pasmanda truths and assertions.

The story circle practice and regular political education generated more safety as we built our understanding, and faced our lack of understanding, about each other’s cultural and caste experiences. And still, conflict is inevitable. We attempted to build a culture of conflict transformation through feedback practices. However, we often struggled to keep our promise to prioritize this practice and fell into patterns of conflict avoidance. When conflict reached a breaking point, we found practitioners to hold processes with us to repair our relationships and transform ourselves through conflict, so that we could continue to be co-directors. We are deeply grateful to those that held us during these painful times, and who continue to hold us. Thank you for growing our muscle to struggle with each other’s feedback and contradictions, grounded in our commitment to being anti-caste.

Voices from our ecosystem on SAALT’s arc of transformation:

“I often use the imperfect analogy of, ‘Imagine a white social justice group operating without having any analysis of white supremacy. How impactful would their social change work really be?’ – to describe why we made this intervention and transition internally.”

“This is risky work. I was taking a lot of personal and professional risks to step into a deep relationships centered approach to practicing anti caste imagination, being in co-stewardship as a Dalit woman.” 

“As a Muslim, I have learned that some form of caste has affected my own family. The caste system predates all present day borders in South Asia, meaning that all of our identities have interacted with caste. Chrysalis just made sense. We could no longer just plod along and ask people to support work that we didn’t believe in while also trying to figure out what we believe in to re-evaluate and restructure.” 

“Caste prevents us from being a people who will show up for each other because it was designed precisely to maintain separation and isolation. And showing up for each other is a fundamental basis for building power.” 

“Given the oppressive, vile, violent oppression of casteism– not only are Hindus divided, but all practicing religions in South Asia are. Caste weakens South Asian identity. I think about the lack of South Asian shared identity that has to be addressed and acknowledged for a political home for our people to exist.” 

“The last year of chrysalis has been one of wonder. How often does one have the chance to face, reckon with, and start to unpack something one has grown up with, something so insidious, and woven into one’s identity? And on top of that, to do it with rigor and in community? 

SUNSET

As part of SAALT’s process of Just Transition, we chose to break ourselves open, re-imagine our organizational values, and challenge dominant non-profit and South Asian American culture. 

We tried reforming SAALT through a co-directorship and chrysalis, but the limitations of the structure did not allow for this transformation. We learned that we could not fully “pause.” The spaciousness we needed for anti-caste political education was frequently compromised by nonprofit compliance issues, fundraising urgencies, and targeted attacks from right wing groups.

It proved ever challenging to slow down, be relational, and have the focus required to unpack caste while simultaneously running SAALT as a national nonprofit. The work we needed to do was deeply cultural and had no “deliverables” for traditional funders.

The more we built our analysis and understood what being anti-caste in this day and age means, the more clarity we gained on how necessary social reform was, and how SAALT, is no longer the vehicle for it.  

We decided to say goodbye to this container that could not be reshaped. We will, however, continue building our anti-caste cultural strategy beyond SAALT’s closing.

HOPES FOR THE FUTURE

“Turn in any direction you like, caste is the monster that crosses your path. You cannot have political reform, you cannot have economic reform, unless you kill this monster.” –Dr. B.R. Ambedkar

One of the most important insights from AoC is Dr. Ambedkar’s assertion that cultural change or social reform must precede political reform. In this vein, here are our hopes for the future:

“What I hope this sunsetting makes possible is space. Space for those with energy and vision to both be responsive to this moment in time and also imagine a future for South Asian movement building centered in anti-caste analysis.”

“Sunsetting allows for anti-caste South Asian organizing and power building to emerge.” 

“I hope it supports us and those who witness us to generate stronger anti-caste formations which learn from the lessons of this experiment. I hope it supports healthy relationship building across caste communities, between high caste and DBA folks, rooted in mutual safety, dignity, and belonging for all South Asians.’'

“What moved me is the possibility to do place based anti caste work, responsibly produce knowledge and culture, build and sustain anti caste cultural infrastructure and transform how anti caste power is built through principled study and struggle.”

“We don’t have to have a national organization or a single national voice. We are actually getting out of the way and helping empower others who are more progressive and radical to take up the space. This sunset isn’t a disappearance, but a building ground for what’s to come. SAALT has built a foundation that has opened up abundant and new possibilities, hopefully to be filled by multiple entities and formations. We’re truly at a cultural turning point in the whole world.”

We are grateful for the many hands that were a part of creating and evolving SAALT.

The initiative of the founders who sought to show up for South Asian America in a time of national crisis. 

The many young staff members who helped shift the organization away from relying on policing as an antidote to harm, and towards generating community healing and safety.

The rigorous feedback from partners who knew a national organization aiming to represent all South Asians needed to show up better for caste oppressed, Muslim, queer, trans, and working class communities. 

The trust and thought partnership of Dalit and Pasmanda leaders who took the risk to transform a high caste institution. 

For the wins, the failures, the struggles, the courage, the kinship, the contradictions. From our hearts, thank you for your leadership. May our ending make way for a more just, loving, and sustainable anti-caste future for all of us.

In community and struggle,

The SAALT board and staff