Amrita Doshi is the co-founder and the Executive Director of South Asian SOAR, an organization dedicated to advancing healing and justice for South Asian survivors of violence and trauma. With a background rooted in both personal survivorship and professional dedication, Amrita’s journey ultimately led to the creation of South Asian SOAR, which stands for Survivors, Organizations, and Allies Rising. Her message is clear: addressing gender-based violence requires more than just survivors or organizations—it’s a collective responsibility, where allies and the entire community play a crucial role.
Your journey into advocacy began with your own experience of survivorship. How has your personal story shaped your approach to founding and leading South Asian SOAR?
My personal experience has informed a lot of my lens on what’s necessary in advocacy and addressing gender based violence. One of the things that sticks out to me the most from my own experience is just the community’s response and reaction and both the ability and inability to support me. I think that shifted for me the understanding of who needs to be educated and informed and available to support survivors. I was really young when I experienced sexual assault. I was 15, and for someone that age, your support system or the community institutions you go to your friends and family of all ages. I understood where can I go to talk about this, to access support for this? What are my resources? Who will believe me and who won’t? That’s what I mean by ability and inability. This was 15 years ago, so at that time, mental health and the conversation around that was so different. Parents today have the awareness around these topics in a way that my parents didn’t have. So that’s what I think about. What knowledge do they have to support not just young people, but people of any generation that are coming to them? Often the places that survivors turn to first are their friends and family, their neighbors, so those are the people that need to have the knowledge and tools to be able to support someone.
What inspired you to co-found South Asian SOAR, and what are some of the core goals and values that drive the organization’s mission?
It was through this experience that I started to seek out organizations where I could actually go and support other survivors. I found SAKHI for South Asian survivors. I interned there as a college student and during the pandemic the executive director Kavita Mehra invited me to join a conversation between her and a couple of organizations that have existed for several decades to support South Asian survivors. Sakhi, Raksha, Daya and Manavi in New Jersey are some of the earliest organizations, and they were talking about bringing together all of these organizations. They were really struggling with the myriad challenges and dealing with them alone. I listened to that first conversation, and thought I can help. I can facilitate. What is it that can bring these organizations together? So that one conversation turned into six months of conversations, about providing acute moment crisis services to survivors, changing policy, changing culture and preventing violence. So we thought about what are the needs? What are the gaps? What’s the vision? And that led to South Asian SOAR. It stands for survivors, organizations and allies rising. And the message being that it actually isn’t just organizations that will solve gender based violence. It’s not just survivors; it’s also allies, or really anyone in the community. It’s a collective responsibility.
How does your work with survivors, organizations and allies help address gender-based violence nationwide?
We build the capacity of organizations on the ground. If they can do their work better, then we can better serve nationwide. We provide skill building to both survivors and allies. So things like storytelling, how to have intergenerational conversations and community organizing, and then we fold all of what we’re learning into national research and advocacy materials. These materials help us build the foundation like, what is the problem anyways? How are we talking about gender based violence? What does it look like right now? What are survivor’s biggest challenges? That help us then identify, what are our goals for advocacy? We have a network of 40 organizations. We have hundreds of survivors and allies who organize with us, and we’ve produced three different kind of national reports and books so far.
What unique challenges do South Asian survivors face, and how does South Asian SOAR specifically address these cultural, societal, and systemic barriers?
There is so much stigma around these issues in our community. It might be helpful to share a few statistics, just for folks to understand the level of violence and prevalence that exists right now. So research tells us that basically about half the South Asian diaspora in the US experiences violence. To be exact, 48% of both South Asian men and women experience some form of gender based violence. That includes physical abuse, which is typically what people think of, but also emotional abuse, which is very important to recognize, sexual abuse, financial abuse, and a few other forms, including in-law abuse, which is something we don’t talk about enough.
In your work, you’ve focused on youth empowerment. What are some of the strategies you’ve found effective in engaging younger generations in survivor advocacy and social justice?
There are two statistics on youth that are really important to know. One study of youth, ages 18 to 34 found that 85% experienced sexual assault. This is South Asian youth, and 41% grew up witnessing domestic violence in their homes, and this is the United States. This study is from 2022. All the studies that I’m referring to are very recent. I think their healing is so important to breaking the cycle of violence. The people that we work with are 18 to 34 years. It’s to have intergenerational conversations, how to feel brave enough to talk about bodies, about harm, about violence, about healing. Just opening up the conversation allows someone to talk about getting access to therapy, getting access to those resources or help. We talk about this with reproductive justice too. If we can’t have conversations around our bodies, then how can we have conversations about reproductive rights? And that is such an important conversation for our community to have.
You’ve been involved in arts and community projects across NYC. How do you think arts and culture can serve as an entry point for difficult conversations, especially about trauma and healing?
I think it’s so important. I’m a dancer. So for me, dance has always been a form of expression. It’s actually how I continued my role in this work. It was producing arts shows, bringing together young artists, dancers, visual artists, musicians, filmmakers, who wanted to talk about gender justice, motherhood, womanhood, femininity, healing and art is a medium to do that. It allows you to create and spark conversations and culture change. It allows you to build community with young folks and community members who want to have these conversations. It allows you to express some of the most difficult conversations. I think art gives people a conduit to have them, sometimes in indirect but really meaningful ways. I also think art has such a healing power. And the last thing, especially for South Asians, much of our way of communicating and honoring our culture is through music, dance, food, clothing, and art has such an innate ability to evoke emotion, to provide healing, to become a tool for processing that I think people have really responded to it.
What advice would you give to young South Asians or anyone passionate about survivor advocacy and social justice who want to make a meaningful impact in their communities?
I have an orientation towards really understanding your own life story and how it drives you. No one can tell you exactly what role you should play in this movement. And there are so many roles to play and serve. I think for young folks, understanding what is it that you care about? What is it in your own life that has made you think a certain way and how does that inform your own perspective? I also recommend listening and learning a lot about what is currently happening. I think there is so much incredible work across local communities to plug into, both here and internationally. There’s a way to bring in almost any skill set to bridge it to a need on the ground.
Looking ahead, what do you see as the next steps for South Asian SOAR? Are there any new initiatives or goals you’re excited to share?
Some of the things I’m really excited about are building more educational resources for our community that is easily accessible. I think that’s a big source so that they can be empowered, and they can be upstanders when they witness violence. Second, we’ve been doing a lot of survivor storytelling work, taking those stories into communities, facilitating group processing spaces where people can say, I witnessed that too, or I experienced that too. There’s been a lot of interest from men to also have spaces for processing their own storytelling. I think that is so important. And just really being hyper vigilant about what we can expect over the next few years and how we will need to move significant resources to organizations on the ground who are going to be facing multiple changes. SOAR as a national network of 40 organizations is going to have a really big role to play. We have a coordinated national response, so that organizations and survivors are supported. That’s one of my biggest focuses right now, in understanding how we can best support organizations, advocates and survivors on the ground over the next few years.
