In this episode, Janet Thorne, chief executive of Reach Volunteering, sits down with Kiran Kaur, CEO of Girl Dreamer, for a wide-ranging conversation about leadership, power, and what the next generation is bringing to the social impact sector.
Kiran opens by drawing on her dual vantage point: running Girl Dreamer while simultaneously conducting research with the University of Birmingham into young women of colour in social impact leadership. From that position, she identifies something that still holds the sector back: a fundamental misunderstanding of what shared power actually means. There remains, she argues, a stubborn hierarchy between who is seen as a leader and who is seen as a beneficiary — and until that shifts, the sector will keep missing the expertise that comes from lived experience combined with professional knowledge.
The conversation moves into community-centred design, and the distinction between designing for people versus designing with them. Kiran explores how leaders with lived experience tend to start from a different premise — one where power has to be distributed for the mission to work — and how that contrasts with structures where hierarchy is still quietly embedded. She references the idea, drawn from American activists, that even human-centred design can carry colonial assumptions, and that true change happens when communities can self-organise and move forward without needing the same structures to rely on.
Janet and Kiran then turn to what has shifted over the past five years. The momentum that followed 2020 — the funding, the recognition, the sense that things were finally moving — has, in Kiran's view, started to regress. The rawness of that moment has faded, and many of the injustices it surfaced remain unresolved. And yet she finds hope, specifically in the wave of Gen Z leaders she is watching step forward. They are, she says, action-oriented in a way previous generations weren't — moving first, questioning the rules rather than following them, and bringing a deep instinct for collectivism that she believes will change the shape of leadership itself.
Joy comes up as an unexpected but important thread. Kiran challenges the assumption that serious, systemic work has to start from a place of deficit and problem. In many cultures and communities, joy, play and radical celebration are how change is driven — and yet funding applications still demand you lead with the problem. She introduces the idea of being healing-centred first, approaching leadership from a place of what people already have and already bring, rather than what they lack.
