photo © Leandro Justen
“It is not about us versus others. It is about what we can all accomplish together, regardless of the color of our skin, or where we were born.”
—MONA SINHA, feminist, activist, philanthropist
I had met Mona Sinha a number of times over the past few years, always at one of the various women’s empowerment events held at posh ballrooms in and around New York City. We often only had enough time for a brief “hello” before another attendee would grab her attention to discuss their latest project. It was not until I was invited to a Sunday brunch at the home of Loreen Arbus, a long-time champion for women’s rights, in early May 2019, that I finally got the chance to hear, first-hand, her personal narrative about what led her to devote her work, and her life, to supporting women and girls around the world. Since her story was unlike any other I had ever heard before, I immediately asked her if I could interview her for my book. She welcomed me into her home just a few weeks later.
“When Mother Teresa told me that she didn’t need me anymore, I cried,” Mona Sinha recalled, as she began talking about her childhood. She had been volunteering part-time at Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Calcutta, India, since she was a sixth grader. After graduating from high school, she planned to spend significant time as a volunteer during the months that she had before the start of college. Initially saddened by her response, Mona soon realized that this was the best advice she could have been given. “Just as she encouraged the children in her orphanage to explore the world, she did the same with me,” Mona said, showing me a signed photo from Mother Teresa along with her handwritten message, “God Bless You.” It led instead to her work with disabled children at the Spastics Society of Eastern India, sparking a love for supporting the underprivileged. Down the road, it shaped her life as a gender rights advocate and mentor to hundreds.
Calcutta is a long way from New York City’s Upper East Side, over eight thousand miles to be exact. Yet as I sat in Mona’s home, her motherland was present in everything from its décor to Mona’s outfit. She was dressed in warm orange and brown earth tones, her dark black hair pulled back, her dark eyes deep and soulful. She leaned against one end of a long beige couch, and I sat at the other, taking note of the small statue of a stallion standing atop an antique brown wood table just behind her. The stallion, I thought, served as the perfect metaphor for the majestic way Mona presented herself—a woman of modest stature yet clearly in command; oozing kindness, but with a firm grip on how she navigates injustice and creates systems for change. Old family photos appeared in vintage frames throughout her home. Before we had sat down together, she showed me some of them, picking up one of her great-grandmother in particular. “She was nicknamed Tigress,” she told me. “I come from a long line of strong women.”
Then there was her grandmother, a woman who, she said, “knew how to shoot a rifle, smoke a cigar, play bridge, and mix drinks, all at only fifteen years old.” Married to the son of the city’s chief of police (under British rule), her grandmother had to quickly learn how to become a gracious hostess to her father-in-law’s British colleagues and friends. Her husband, a lawyer, however, was a nationalist fighting for freedom. They lived in the same home, which presented a conundrum. “Her life changed during the independence movement of the late 1940s, where she was the gracious hostess during the day, but, at night,” Mona told me, “she would sneak out of the house and drive into town with her husband, despite the curfews and amid the mounting riots, and they would secretively bring wounded activists back to their basement to be tended to. After all, who would think of looking for them in the police chief’s home?” It’s no wonder that people in her city soon began referring to her grandmother as Florence Nightingale. Very strong, both brave and bold and able to live this double life.
Although Mona wasn’t aware of her foremothers’ extraordinary levels of compassion and courage until later in her life, she was fortunate to witness these qualities in another woman who would become her early inspiration, Mother Teresa. In the overpopulated and impoverished city of Calcutta, Mother Teresa started a new order in 1950, The Sisters of Charity, to help those who she felt were the “forgotten human beings,” providing homes for orphans, lepers, the dying, and the destitute. It brought safety and dignity to their lives.
“When I was a schoolgirl in sixth grade, I was chosen to bring the crafts we made to the children at Mother Teresa’s orphanage,” Mona recalled. “When I first stepped through its doors, I was blown away. I never knew there were kids my own age living there.” Though Mona described the scene as “chaotic,” filled with lots of noise, babies crying, and kids running around freely, she added, “All you felt was love, deep love everywhere.” She said that while these kids had very little in terms of material possessions, they were still happy. Yet it was here that she first saw gender discrimination. “Given male preference in our society, many of the boys were adopted, while the girls got left behind,” she said.
Calcutta was a special place to grow up, where she saw everyone, regardless of caste or creed, living together as a community. Mona attended midnight Mass on Christmas Eve every year without associating it with Christianity and celebrated Eid with her Muslim friends in great anticipation of the delicious meals that were shared together. Across the city, everybody came together to celebrate the Goddess Durga for five days each year as the powerful symbol of feminine strength. Even today, Muslims care for the synagogue, as few Jewish people are left in the city. Despite that, women and girls were often discriminated against, and male preference was prevalent in her own family of three daughters. “Calcutta is where the seeds of who I am developed.” It was by nurturing her innate compassion and generosity that Mona was also emboldened to shift the reality of discrimination.
Mona’s true courage was tested when Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984, prompting her to leave her country. “I was already attending an excellent university there,” she said, “but classes were disrupted due to the political chaos, so I knew I would have to get an education somewhere else.” Determined to go to an all-women’s college in the US to fully explore her burgeoning feminist core, she ultimately attended Smith College in Massachusetts on a full scholarship. “Smith College had its first female president at the time, Jill Ker Conway,” Mona said. “I had read her book, and she inspired me. Gloria Steinem was also a graduate. I knew this was the right college for me.”
But there were more ways to be inspired and much more to learn beyond the walls of Smith College. She recalled feeling “free but also frightened out of my wits,” by having to learn how to fit into a new culture with no family support. There was a new lesson to learn every minute, and this was particularly the case when she met her advisor, who was also the chair of the Economics Department, Professor Cynthia Taft-Morris. “I went to a reception at the president’s house, and this very tall woman with crutches—she’d had polio—walked right up to me, lifted up one of her crutches, and said she was looking for me,” Mona recalled. Taft-Morris was eager to meet Mona after learning of her background in Calcutta, and of her courage to travel all the way to Smith alone for an education. She then took her house key off her key ring, gave it to Mona, and invited her to have tea with her the next day. As another Smith professor said, “If Professor Taft-Morris loved you, she had your back; if she didn’t, you knew it right away.” That meeting turned into years of Taft-Morris’s guiding, supporting, and mentoring her, although Mona was not aware of the professor’s lineage at first, as the grandniece of former US President William Howard Taft. “I kept that house key with me every day until I graduated,” Mona recalled with a smile. Smith unlocked many treasured experiences including meeting and working with Gloria Steinem, whom she described as her “North Star.” In return, Gloria recently described Mona in the following way: “Mona lives in a world without boundaries … as a citizen of the world, she has always seen people as linked, not ranked.” Ultimately, Mona served as a Smith College trustee and helped shape and guide the largest-ever capital campaign for a women’s college, raising close to half a billion dollars.
While a student at Smith, Mona was encouraged to discover her true promise, and she afforded the same to others in return. Even after building a successful early career in one of the most competitive, male-dominated industries, investment banking, Mona’s philanthropic roots never faltered. “I chose a career in banking because I wanted to feel financially secure and learn some real financial skills,” Mona told me. While working at Morgan Stanley, her first job out of college, she quickly built a solid reputation. After business school at Columbia University, she moved to Unilever, where she learned about brand building and innovation by working on such iconic brands as Vaseline Intensive Care and Pond’s. Ultimately, she moved to Elizabeth Arden (a Unilever owned company at that time) to rebuild the Asia Pacific Oceania market. “I was in my thirties, and I would spend more than half the year in Asia.” She says that during this time, she had to utilize both business and life skills, be at once demanding and encouraging, while reshaping the businesses in diverse markets. Her teams across the world had to trust her in tough financial times as they worked on turning around their businesses. Many years later, several of them stay in touch, a testament to her leadership.
“Fundamentally, I am successful because of my restructuring background in business. I can see where the holes are. I can read a business plan and see what pivots are needed,” she said. “Once you assess the biggest gaps, you see where the opportunities lie.” During her time with Unilever, she was spending six weeks in Asia and then four weeks at home. “It was exhausting and exhilarating at the same time, but definitely not sustainable. I had no time for family and had to make some tough decisions.”
Therefore, when she was provided with an opportunity to accelerate her career even further, she decided against it. “I knew, deep down, I didn’t want this as a long-term career,” she told me. “It was time for me to use the skills I’d learned as a negotiator in banking and restructuring businesses to build sustainable organizations with leaders who could change the world, as I had been taught to do from the beginning in Calcutta.”
And that’s exactly what she has been doing for the past twenty years. Leaving investment banking to enter the nonprofit world, she has mentored hundreds of women, particularly around the impact of education and economic independence. She has also invested financially in many entrepreneurs. “By attending Smith College, I learned the importance of education, and what it can do for young women,” Mona said, now sitting more upright. “I can see what these women are capable of achieving even before they do. I want to be like Professor Taft-Morris in their lives.” This mission has led her to become a founding member of the Asian Women’s Leadership project, which is focused on empowering women as future leaders in Asia. One of her mentees wrote in a card she shared with me, “I am so thankful for you as a mentor and friend. Thank you for believing in me when I did not believe in myself. Your incredibly inspiring spirit is so needed in this world.”
She also recognizes where there is a need for leadership and steps in. When the Science and Nature Program, which serves underprivileged girls (and others) at the American Museum of Natural History, was in danger of closing down, she raised the funds to help it grow, and today it educates hundreds of children in science. Her love for Calcutta is manifest through her board work with Apne Aap, an anti-trafficking organization based in India, where she brought her daughters to visit a safe house for prostitutes and participated in a group art project with the kids. A few years ago, she and her children traveled with Gloria Steinem to the lower Zambezi, where she is still involved with projects that enable women to be economically independent. “I gained a daughter, Alice, who is a leader in her community,” she says with a smile. “She makes me so proud by working to stop child marriage and give young women a chance at living a full life.”
Mona is also the board chair of Women Moving Millions, an organization dedicated to mobilizing unprecedented resources for the empowerment of women and girls by each member committing a million dollars to advance gender equality. In 2017, she cofounded Raising Change, Inc., to teach mission-driven organizations how to raise resources for social change. She serves on numerous other boards as well, including the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School, the Columbia Global Mental Health program (a collaboration with the World Health Organization), and Breakthrough, a human rights and justice organization. More recently, her activism has taken root as a board member of the ERA Coalition, which is pushing Congress to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution for the first time in history.
While doing so, however, she has not lost sight of the impressionable impact she is making as a woman of color and a representative of immigrant people. “When I represent these organizations and speak publicly on their behalf, I am showing that it is not about us versus others. It is about what we can all accomplish together, regardless of the color of our skin or where we were born,” she reflected. Her leadership has been recognized with many awards including the 2015 Ellis Island Medal of Honor.
In 2020, Mona is planning to place a greater priority on funding grassroots women leaders who are making systemic changes with little outside support. “They can make real change because they are proximate to their work,” Mona said. “That is the lesson I learned from Mother Teresa and the leaders I now work with. These changemakers need our strong support because they are pushed down by patriarchal systems everywhere.” She then showed me an article she printed out for me, “Philanthropy for the Women’s Movement, Not Just ‘Empowerment,’” published in Stanford University’s Social Innovation Review newsletter on November 4, 2019. It reported that women’s and girls’ groups received only 1.6 percent of US-based charitable giving in 2016, and that US foundation funding for foreign groups that advocate for gender equality dropped from 30 percent to 15 percent from 2002–2013. “We cannot allow this to happen,” Mona warns. “If you want the world to improve, you must believe in women as the true agents of change.”
In addition to helping others, she also holds a deep commitment to her own family. As a wife and the mother of three children, she proudly told me, “My husband and son are feminists, as are my twin girls.” She has been married for over thirty years to her childhood sweetheart. Just then, her son stepped into the living room where we were sitting, wearing a T-shirt with the name “Brearley School,” an all-girls school, emblazoned in bold letters across its front. “He wears one from Smith College as well,” she said, smiling at him.
She then turned to one of her two golden retrievers, Charlie Brown, a certified therapy dog who had been lying on the sprawling antique rug draped across the hardwood floor throughout our interview. “You see, even he serves others, just like every one of us should. Both my dogs are my personal therapists, helping me think clearly as we go on our early morning walks.”