Dhakshayini is an activist, entrepreneur, strategy consultant, and yoga teacher. She began her career as a civil engineer in the water industry at Sinclair Knight Merz (now Jacobs). After realising that she wanted to apply her technical and problem-solving skills to big societal challenges, she worked for organisations such as the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) in Fiji, Net Balance (now part of EY), Small Giants, and Foundation for Young Australians.

She has had the opportunity to work on projects related to engaging women in STEM, climate change adaptation in the Pacific, and building young peoples’ skills for the future of work. Dhakshayini perceived a gap in the market around government and industry needing to design with rather than for young people, to ensure that policies and products are more relevant and meaningful.

This led to the creation of YLab (www.ylab.global), a social business start-up within the Foundation for Young Australians. YLab now employs 70 young people (aged 18-30), trains them in systems thinking and design, and deploys them on codesign projects related to the most pressing challenges of our time.

Dhakshayini is now freelance speaker, facilitator, Senior Service Designer working on equity and inclusion at RMIT and co-founder of a new start-up called Decolonised Design. Her favourite thing to think and talk about is how structural power impacts on design, entrepreneurship and social change. Her perspective can be summed up by the following recent tweet – “When people are woke enough to know the language to discuss race, gender, class and oppression generally but not quite woke enough to give anything up – space, power, platform, reputation, position. This is arguably the most destructive pattern of behaviour of our time.”

https://au.linkedin.com/in/dhakshayini-sooriyakumaran-03623b38

@Dhakshayini_S