Mallika Kaur

Executive Director

Mallika Kaur is a writer, lawyer, and educator who focuses on human rights with a specialization in gender and minority issues. For 19 years now, Mallika has directly worked with victim-survivors of gender-based violence—as an emergency room crisis counselor, attorney, and expert witness. She has closely worked with and for Sikh and other immigrant communities across the United States post 9/11. In South Asia, she has worked with non-governmental organizations and advocates on gendered violence; farmer suicides; female feticide; enforced disappearances, and transitional and transformative justice. Kaur writes regularly and for online and print media as well as academic publications; her work has been published in Foreign Policy, Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, California Law Review among others. She regularly trains and presents on issues of cultural humility, elimination of bias, and negotiating trauma.

Kaur received her Master in Public Policy from the Kennedy School at Harvard and JD from UC Berkeley Law School, where she currently teaches skills-based and experiential social justice classes. She’s practiced law in California including as counsel at ADZ Law, a San Francisco Bay Area family law and victims’ rights firm.  She is the co-founder (2009) of Sikh Family Center and served as Board Chair till 2021. With a commitment to weaving collaborative networks of change, Mallika has a track record working with diverse populations within and outside the Sikh community. She has designed creative preventative programs for SFC and also regularly provides technical assistance and training to our partners.

Mallika’s recent book “Faith, Gender, and Activism in the Punjab Conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper” was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019 and focuses on Punjab’s human rights defenders who had the fearlessness to stand up during very dangerous times. She believes what happens inside a home is intimately connected to what happens inside a community as a whole: struggles are interconnected, commitment to justice must never be selective.