This month, NTEN bid adieu to Thomas Negron, our Communications Director, as he embarked on his well-earned retirement journey. Grateful for his enduring legacy, we now warmly welcome Asmita Ghosh as our new Communications Director. Asmita brings to NTEN her passion and experience in grassroots digital advocacy and campaigning for feminist nonprofits in India, and her work leading communications at an international coalition of nonprofits in the public digital health sector. I asked her five questions to help you learn more about our newest team member.
At NTEN, we love good food and enjoy sharing recipes, trying new restaurants together during staff meetings, and ensuring we have the best snacks during the conference. What's your favorite meal from growing up?
Ooh, this is a tough one — I take my food seriously. Having grown up in a Bengali family in the non-Bengali, South Indian city of Chennai, my palate was fortunate to experience the wildly different flavor profiles of Bengali (slightly sweet, lots of mustard) and Tamil (tangy, spicy, lots of tamarind) cuisines.
My happy place is the traditional big Sunday afternoon Bengali meal of luchi-mangsho. Luchi is a type of puffed bread (also called poori in other Indian languages), and mangsho – literally, 'meat' – is a rich, wholesome, drips-off-the-bone mutton curry.
But the food I miss the most since moving to the U.S. is dosa—a South Indian fermented crispy flatbread made from lentils with a deliciously crispy-soft texture and a mildly sour taste. Fun fact: It is the oldest type of "bread" in the world, with references to it being eaten as early as 1 AD. Perfect then, perfect now.
What was your first job?
I owe so much to my first job! Right after graduating college, I joined the founder of a then-small feminist digital media startup, Feminism in India, as its first and only employee. As our small team gradually grew, so did our online following, and by the time I left 3.5 years later, it was one of India's largest intersectional feminist digital media platforms.
This was the job that grew my feminist consciousness beyond the liberal upper-caste feminist bubble in which I had previously been ensconced. I learned and grew so much, both in my politics and my digital media production and marketing skills. We partnered with grassroots nonprofits to amplify their communities’ stories, shared Indian feminists’ struggles and victories while existing in a deeply patriarchal society, covered rallies and marches, and organized folks' attendance to the many protests against India's fascist Citizenship Amendment Act in the winter of 2019 that sought to delegitimize Indian Muslims. I am very grateful for that experience.
The NTEN team is spread across the U.S. in 8 different states. Where do you live now, and what do you like about it?
I moved to the U.S. less than a year ago for grad school with a very specific objective — to live in New York. (I don't recommend gleaning career advice from my whimsical life choices.) I have always been a big-city girl, having lived in three of India's largest metropolises prior — Chennai, Delhi, and Bangalore. New York is the big city, and it had fascinated me for years through the many TV shows I'd watched that captured its vibrancy.
I loved the city instantly. Its chaos reminded me of home (New Yorker jaywalkers have nothing on Indian pedestrians), and its diversity made me feel a lot less out of place as a foreigner in this vast country. On my second day, I spotted a subway ad written in my native Bengali script! My favorite things about this city are its diversity (someone once told me, "Immigrants are automatically and instantly New Yorkers!"), its gorgeous, sprawling parks, and its walkability and public transit system.
While we are certain there will be many incredible things we do with you on the team, we know there are some great things you've already been part of. What's something you are proud of from your career already?
Trigger warning – mentions of gender-based violence and rape.
One of the projects I am proudest of having worked on while at Feminism in India, the digital media platform I mentioned earlier, was the #GBVinMedia project.
With a grant I'd received from Women Deliver, I developed a toolkit for journalists and media students on how to write about and report cases of rape and other forms of gender-based violence ethically and responsibly. Research for this involved months of reading news reports of rape and sexual assault to trace narrative patterns that reinforced rape culture. Whew, do not recommend! But the output from this report was something I was very proud of. We presented the toolkit I'd developed in dozens of journalism schools and conferences around the country.
I also designed a digital advocacy campaign on this issue. A part of this campaign was creating a crowdsourced art campaign to develop a license-free image bank of empowering images that newsrooms could use alongside their reportage, instead of the victimizing and triggering imagery that were commonly used at the time. Following this campaign, many leading media houses began using our image bank for their news reports.
And, what's something you hope to put on your resume one day?
I have flirted with the idea of someday running my own communications and campaigns consultancy – but even saying it out loud feels scary! Communications are often overlooked and under-resourced in most nonprofits, with small teams managing big mandates. I'd like to develop tools, products, systems, and services for nonprofits and other changemakers to use communications more effectively in their advocacy and campaigning efforts. However, entrepreneurship is a daunting and stressful journey, so I am very much in two minds about it. Check back in with me in ten years.
Amy Sample Ward
they/them
CEO, NTEN
Amy is driven by a belief that the nonprofit technology community can be a movement-based force for positive change. Their prior experience in direct service, policy, philanthropy, and capacity-building organizations has fueled Amy's work to create meaningful, inclusive, and compassionate community engagement and educational opportunities for organizations around the world. As the CEO of NTEN, Amy inspires the NTEN team and global partners to believe in community-generated change. Amy believes technology can help nonprofits reach their missions more effectively and equitably, but doing so takes intention and investment in training, access, and collaboration.
