The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

“It is the heat and friction of two people’s differences that propel them to explore new ways of being.”

No matter what views others may have, I am the one who has to answer for my actions, and this is my answer.

So instead of saying, “It’s beyond our mandate,” we said, “We want to help protect you from violence. How can we do that?”

Anytime you have a category of tasks that’s considered “women’s work” that men will not share, it reinforces a false hierarchy that prevents men and women from doing productive work together. Breaking that hierarchy actually leads to men’s empowerment, because it allows men to discover the power of partnership and lets them develop their caring sid

“Their cup is not empty; you can’t just pour your ideas into it. Their cup is already full, so you have to understand what is in their cup.” If you don’t understand the meaning and beliefs behind a community’s practices, you won’t present your idea in the context of their values and concerns, and people won’t hear you.

When any community pushes any group out, especially its women, it’s creating a crisis that can only be reversed by bringing the outsiders back in. This is the core remedy for poverty and almost any social ill—including the excluded, going to the margins of society and bringing everybody back in.

They believed that many newborn deaths could be prevented with practices that cost little or nothing and could be done by the community: immediate breastfeeding, keeping the baby warm, cutting the cord with sterilized tools.

In Journey of the Heart, an extraordinary book on relationships, John Welwood points out what he calls “a natural balancing process” between partners. He writes: “Anything that one partner ignores, the other will feel a greater need to emphasize. Whatever quality of being I deny, such as power, softness or playfulness, my partner will find herself

Two years after I returned from that trip, our foundation launched an HIV prevention program for India that relied on the leadership of sex workers. We called it Avahan, a Sanskrit word for “call to action.”