Uma Viswanathan is a mission-driven interfaith leader dedicated to fostering belonging in communities, institutions and culture. She joins the Interfaith Lecture Series and its Week One theme of “Potluck Nation: Why We Need Each Other to Thrive — In Partnership with Interfaith America” at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy to discuss pluralism, civic engagement, and ways to foster and support that work.
Viswanathan has spent more than two decades in the fields of philanthropy, leadership development and social change. In that time, she has opened new perspectives and mobilized significant philanthropic resources to support human-centered, culturally rooted leadership and civic engagement.
For example, in her time as executive director of the funder collaborative New Pluralists, she led a groundbreaking philanthropic collaborative that, in just three years, raised and invested $40 million to support the emerging field of pluralism — enabling diverse storytellers, practitioners and researchers to shape and test ways to heal America’s polarized culture. In a post on the New Pluralists website, Viswanathan wrote that, just as the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted what was most important to individuals and society, it also amplified and exacerbated underlying social issues — a “disconnect from our shared humanity” and distrust in institutions among them.
“We’ve limited the range of words and expressions that are acceptable and possible among those whom we’ve labeled as ‘us,’” she wrote. “And as we dig our heels in, we are losing. We are all losing on the beautiful possibility of what we could become.”
“If democracy is grounded in open discourse and exchange of ideas, our democracy is balancing on a thin wire,” she continued. “Not just the institutions of democracy, but our belief in the social experiment that started just a few centuries ago.”
A certified meditation and breathwork instructor with the Art of Living Foundation, Viswanathan earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology and master’s degree in the history of science from Harvard University, and studied then taught meditation and yogic philosophy. That work took her across the country, working in a number of communities, and then to Haiti for four years. There, she worked to create healing spaces for hundreds of people, establishing a network of young leaders “who are overcoming decades of corruption and deprivation of basic human needs and building their own solutions to the problems in their communities,” she wrote.
Then, working in the nonprofit field in Oakland, she “began to see clearly the distance between how philanthropy often conceptualizes and engages in change, and the human, relational, messy and dynamic process of change in communities,” she wrote. “I entered into philanthropy seeking to become a bridge between funders and the human nature of social change work.”
Viswanathan became a grant maker with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and W.K. Kellogg Foundation, where she championed diverse and culturally-rooted leadership approaches and stewarded over $200 million in philanthropic investments towards community-driven systems and cultural transformation.
“Through my work with so many different types of people, communities, and leaders, I have discovered that the more belonging we feel with ourselves, the more we can experience ourselves as part of an interconnected whole,” Viswanathan wrote. “Belonging, pluralism, empathy building, bridging aren’t simply logical, intellectual terms. They are embodied and experienced and can be nurtured.”
