During these uncertain, dangerous times, we find strength in connection and community. With this acknowledgment, we wanted to ground this year’s Bridge Conference with someone who thrives on community engagement through interactive storytelling.
The Art of Being Water invites us to embrace the power of adaptability, resilience, connection, and collective flow. Sangita is the Principal and Founder of Be The Change Consulting and brings over 20 years of experience leading transformative change. She is widely recognized as an expert in building the conditions for organizations and movements to truly thrive. We are honored to announce that Sangita Kumar will open this year’s Bridge Conference as our opening keynote speaker.
“There’s so much power in water and it is essential to life. It’s a part of all of us,” said Sangita about anchoring us in the Bridge Conference theme. “To be water feels like: how do we embrace the different states that we can be in?”
Sangita plans to explore how organizations can move with intention through this interactive keynote. She will invite Bridge attendees to share their own stories and moments of being in flow with the world around them and bring those stories to life through playback theater.
Playback theater invites us to listen deeply and understand why a story matters to the person telling it. “What does it take for us to deepen a sense of community through the way that we listen [and] through the way that we share,” said Sangita. “What does this story reveal to me about what this person cares about, who this person is, or what has happened to this person? And it helps to cultivate empathy.”
For Sangita, empathy allows us to stay fluid in the world while humanizing perspectives and experiences different from our own. This keynote will be interactive and connective, reminding us that we are surrounded by brilliant and diverse practitioners and providers whose lived experiences hold valuable wisdom.
“We want to bring the people with the stories and say if their story was important, then the person who told the story is also important,” said Sangita about how this keynote will ground attendees through the two-day conference. “Let’s learn to look at them, listen to them, and value them.”
Sangita Kumar is a multifaceted strategist, facilitator, systems builder, movement organizer, and change agent committed to advancing social justice and community empowerment. 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 the upliftment of 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.
Beyond her consulting and podcasting work, Sangita serves as a co-director of 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.
