2026 Bridge Keynote Speaker: Sangita Kumar

Sangita Kumar (she/her) is a multifaceted strategist, facilitator, systems builder, movement organizer, and change agent committed to advancing social justice and community empowerment. She brings over 20 years of expertise in designing and leading transformative change across sectors, including education, nonprofit, private, government, and philanthropy. Her human-centered approach is deeply rooted in equity and social justice, and she is widely recognized as an expert in building the conditions for organizations and movements to truly thrive.

As the Principal and Founder of Be the Change Consulting, a woman-owned, people-of-color-operated firm, Sangita leads a team specializing in curriculum design, capacity building, strategic planning, and community engagement. Her practice integrates organizational development, trauma and somatics, and social justice ideology, driven by a commitment to equity-centered design thinking, community resilience, and uplifting collective wisdom. She holds a Master’s Degree in Organizational Development, is a Certified Life Coach, and is certified in Somatics and Trauma Practice. She has developed and published over 25 unique pieces of social-justice curriculum for youth and adult learners. 

Sangita is also the co-host of Liberated AF: The Workplace Revolution, a podcast that cuts through toxic workplace norms to unpack the hard truths, messy growth, and radical imagination required to build workplaces where everyone actually thrives. The show tackles topics ranging from power hoarding in leadership to authentic inclusion and organizational change.

Beyond her consulting and podcasting work, Sangita co-directs the Belonging Resident Company (BRC), an innovative dance and theater troupe hosted by the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley. The BRC amplifies frameworks of belonging through movement, poetry, spoken word, and Playback Theater, inspired by Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, generating healing and envisioning collective solutions to our most pressing social challenges.

When not working, Sangita balances her adrenaline junkie spirit with journaling, meditation, doodling, and interior design, always striving to embody the change she works to create in the world.

To Be Water: Cultivating Belonging, Adaptability, and Collective Flow in Youth Development

Keynote Speaker: Sangita Kumar, with the Belonging Resident Company

Sangita Kumar and members of the Belonging Resident Company—Bolo, Chetna, Success, and Carla—will guide participants through an experiential journey that brings the conference theme into the room. We will begin by grounding in intention and reconnecting to the values that anchor us. From there, participants will engage in a playful collective problem-solving challenge, activating the creativity, flexibility, and resilience we already use every day in our work with young people. Through Playback Theatre – an improvisational form in which personal stories are immediately transformed into movement, sound, and theater – the Belonging Resident Company will bring these experiences to life.

Together, we will not only talk about resilience and adaptability; we will practice them, witness them, and feel them. By seeing our individual stories reflected back as part of a larger collective story, participants will surface the knowledge already flowing through this field: how we respond creatively to change, how belonging strengthens our capacity to adapt, and how we can move through challenge without losing sight of who and what we are here for.

The keynote invites us to leave with a different understanding of resilience: not becoming harder in response to difficult conditions, but becoming more responsive, connected, imaginative, and able to move—like water.

Stay tuned for more information on the members of the Belonging Resident Company!