Vandana Shiva Poverty Scholars' Event

On Sunday, July 11, 2010, Vandana Shiva, one of the world’s most inspirational community and environmental leaders, along with her sister Mira, visited the Poverty Initiative office for lunch and an intimate strategic conversation about the broad struggle to end poverty.  Vandana received the Right Livelihood Award in 1993 (often referred to as the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’) and the Sydney Peace Prize in 2010 for her extensive and highly influential work in promoting the sustainable food movement in India, advocating for food and seed sovereignty, and fighting to protect traditional knowledge from being co-opted by modern intellectual property rights law.   She has challenged and defeated Monsanto and other multi-national agribusinesses in the Indian Supreme Court and the World Trade Organization over their attempts to patent seeds, claiming instead that these belong to communities and must remain within the public realm to protect farmers’ rural livelihoods.  

The conversation at the Poverty Initiative office was educational, engaged, and inspiring.  Willie Baptist, coordinator of the Poverty Initiative’s Poverty Scholars Program said afterwards that, “the work that Vandana Shiva is doing is critical for our development as Poverty Scholars and for promoting this concept of engaged intellectualism that is essential in building a viable social movement.”

Member of the Poverty Initiative and a PhD student in Ethics, Charlene Sinclair, was, “blown away by the depth of her intelligence.  She was an inspirational model of someone who has dedicated their intellectual capacity to building a movement for positive social change.”  Professor Paul Knitter was also at the lunch and he called it a much needed, “spirit-booster.”   The Poverty Initiative live-streamed the event to its network of Poverty Scholars across the country – the recorded stream can be viewed  above.