Panthea Lee. Social Transformation

In this conversation, I speak with Panthea Lee.  She has written for The Nation, The Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, worked at the United Nations, and co-founded a social justice organization, Reboot, which she led for over 13 years working on initiatives and launching programs in over 30 countries for the likes of UNICEF and the World Bank. Her full bio below.

I first learned about Panthea by reading he story on the cover of The Nation, Sex, Death, and Empire: The Roots of Violence Against Asian Women, which is a must read.   Subsequently, I learned about her work in social transformation, structural justice and I wanted to ask her about her observations and wisdom on how change happens.  More on her reflections on Love and Liberation, here.

We talk about "the work" needing to be commensurate to our positionality and passions, scale and leverage, awareness vs alignment, being in the fight vs being of service, cosmic justice, how the biggest problems are relational problems. We also talk about her move back to Taiwan and what salsa dancing can inform us about power and leadership. 

Panthea Lee (she/they) is a writer, cultural worker, and transdisciplinary designer/facilitator committed to life and liberation. She has stewarded and supported coalitions of community leaders, artists, healers, activists, and institutions fighting for dignity in over 30 countries. Her practice is rooted in commitments to deimperialization, collective healing, and global solidarity, and explores ways—through narrative, practice, and infrastructure—to weave the spiritual and political in realizing structural justice. Panthea has held fellowships at Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity and Digital Civil Society Lab, and at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination. She has served as trustee at DemocracyNext, The Laundromat Project, People Powered, and RSA (Royal Society of Arts). From 2010-23, she served as co-founder and Executive Director of the award-winning Reboot. Her work has been covered by Al Jazeera, CNN, Fast Company, and New York Times, and her words have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, In These Times, The Nation, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and more. Panthea is based in Taipei, Taiwan, on the traditional lands of the Ketagalan people. https://www.panthealee.com/