#51: Creating a violence-free world
A Q&A with global non-profit founder, Hera Hussain
Hello!
We’re down to the penultimate issue of 2022, and my is it a good one.
This week you’re hearing from Hera Hussain, founder and CEO of Chayn—a global non-profit that creates resources on the web to address gender-based violence. Raised in Pakistan and living in the UK, Hera knew from early on she wanted to tackle violence against women. To date, Chayn’s multilingual resources—designed with, not for survivors—have reached more than 500,000 people.
Hera’s pioneering work has earned her multiple accolades. She’s an Ashoka Fellow, and was on the Forbes 30 Under 30, MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35, and European Young Leader 2020 lists. But what strikes me most about Hera is how she leads. Honest, open, caring—it’s feminist leadership at its best. That’s partly why this week’s Q&A is longer than usual: Hera is willing to share the good, the bad, and the ugly of non-profit leadership and entrepreneurship, and we need to normalise that.
So grab a cup of something warm and get comfortable. We’re going to cover the story behind Chayn, the role of tech in gender-based violence, the power of trauma-informed design and working in the open, and more.
The story behind Chayn is a personal one. What led you to found it?
I had just graduated from university in Scotland. I was trying to help two Pakistani friends escape abusive marriages in Pakistan and the UK and struggling to get them support.
My friend in Pakistan wasn't allowed to leave the house unaccompanied. And she came from a powerful family, so the police would not have helped her. Consequently, she just blamed herself for what was happening. She spent hours reading articles online to help her cope, but most online South Asian law forums are full of male lawyers explaining how women misuse the divorce law. So I researched divorce law, contacted local organisations, and tried to find her a job so she could have disposable income.
My friend in the UK was a migrant. Because she wasn't sure about her visa status, she didn't want to call the police in case her details ended up with the Immigration authority. She was afraid of being separated from her child. Though she spoke English, it was hard for her to talk about the abuse in her voice. She wanted me to explain it instead. I must have called a dozen or more helplines, and there were roadblocks at every turn. Either the helplines weren't open when her partner was out, or they wouldn't let me speak on her behalf, and she wouldn't talk. So I had to pretend to be her. Even then, many organisations could not support her because of her immigration status. Eventually, we discovered a six-week wait for the next available shelter accommodation. So we thought about applying for social housing or a loan, but we struggled to find accessible information on the application process and implications on child custody arrangements. We scoured over 200 websites searching for answers—the language was convoluted, written by experts, and everything was locked away in hundred-page-long PDFs. When we did manage to find simple material, we encountered racial stereotyping: happy women were always white, and the sad women running away with bruises were always Black and brown. If translated content was available, it contained critical grammatical errors—like incorrect gender—and the advice had a patriarchal framing.
I couldn't let this slide: vulnerable women, like my friends, turning to the internet and being let down. That's why I founded Chayn.
Chayn has always been a digital-first organisation. What role does technology play in the fight against gender-based violence?
Technology is a double-edged sword in the fight against gender-based violence.
On the one hand, the internet is an empowering tool for vulnerable women who cannot leave the house or are being surveilled. They might be unable to reach out to authorities due to immigration or residential status. And they may be unsure about reporting sexual assault for fear of being judged by society. In oppressive places, the web is where many marginalised genders build communities and can be themselves. Often, their smartphone is their only lifeline. Chayn puts information and help at their fingertips.
On the other hand, the internet is an oppressive tool. People use it to harass and abuse women and marginalised genders. We must fight that, too—by changing legislation and technology design and creating consequences for abuse.
Chayn's website states: "We flip the design default and put the experience of marginalised people at the heart of what we do, opening up access to our resources for all." What is the default? And why did you decide to flip it?
All genders live in a world designed by men, for men. So even unconsciously, tech companies are building products with a male user in mind. It wouldn't have occurred to the first social media networks, for example, that the harassment and abuse women experience offline will only get worse online.
There's a market problem too. Product teams and senior executives at tech companies tend to be white and male. These problem-solving people could be working to reduce the harm women and marginalised genders face. But they don't because they're either ignorant about it and/or don't think it's important. The consequences are serious—money poured into products, policies, and services that are unsafe by design and put survivors at risk.
This is why we decided to flip it. We're modelling the values we want to see in the technology around us.
Chayn invites its volunteers to operational and strategy meetings, including board meetings. This is quite unusual for a non-profit. How has volunteer participation led to new perspectives or decisions?
I'm very passionate about sharing power and nurturing feminist leadership in communities.
Our hybrid staff-volunteer model exemplifies our values and principles in practice. When Chayn began in 2013, we were run solely by volunteers. In 2020, we grew a staffed team to support the vision of a networked movement for a future free of violence, and now we operate a hybrid volunteer-staff model.
Volunteers remain critical to our product design, decision-making, and governance. Most of our volunteers and staff are survivors of abuse; they draw on their lived experiences to create powerful resources that could have helped them. And they write with a multicultural lens. This is how we provide rich and relatable content for our users, by embracing trauma-informed design.
On top of supporting others, our innovative structure allows volunteers to grow and lead. This is important because many of our lived-experience volunteers have either never worked or have low self-esteem due to their past abuse. It's exhilarating and rewarding for them to launch resources, run projects, and represent the organisation.
We're also committed to maintaining an operating model that provides lived-experience volunteers with flexibility. For example, we break down our strategy into quarterly cycles and set short-term sprint goals so our volunteers can periodically reflect on their capacity. They can complete a cycle and then decide to take a break, with the freedom to rejoin when the time is right for them. We've found this approach to be both inclusive and supportive.
Another difference between Chayn and traditional non-profits is how much information you make public. Chayn's 2022-2025 strategy is available in Google Docs, and you've been publishing weeknotes on Medium since 2020. What benefits do you and Chayn get from working in the open?
For me, foremost, it's a matter of principle. Too many leaders run opaque organisations where employees have no clue what is happening or whether their ideas contribute to important decisions.
I believe in the collaborative decision-making and participatory methodologies of feminist leadership. Leading in the open means talking about what's not working and how I'm feeling. It reminds my peers and the people I work with that I'm human. If they can see me fail and pick myself up again, they're more likely to do the same. And it's beneficial for those outside the non-profit sector, too: it demystifies the process and experience of running a charity.
The main benefit of leading in the open is increased trust. From staff, trustees, partners, and users. It's also a way to inspire people. Whenever I take a break from writing my weeknotes, silent readers will contact me to say how much they love reading them. Quite a few people have even started publishing weeknotes because of seeing mine, which makes my heart flutter!
You recently wrote about the physical and mental strain of fundraising and noted how peers in the charity sector "simply expected" your stress. If stress is normalised in this way for non-profit execs, what are the consequences? And what can we do about it?
It means people like me burn out. As the CEO, I want to support my staff in every way possible, which means stepping in and carrying the burden. For instance, if someone falls ill and has to take time out, I usually cover. And even though we run on a 4-day week, I almost always work 5. Because if I don't work that extra day, I miss out on fundraising opportunities that secure my staff's pay. On top of that, there's the HR, the strategic planning, the partnership building. You carry it all. And it gets too much.
When the fundraising situation gets tough, sometimes I don't want to wake up or get out of bed. Until I realised other charity leaders were facing these struggles, I felt I couldn't share these kinds of things. Especially when everyone in the sector is hearing stories about charity executives taking big pay cheques and bonuses. I was afraid of being judged against that toxic stereotype. But I decided to start talking about it. I discovered there were other leaders like me and that non-managerial charity employees were more sympathetic towards their leaders than I realised.
You asked what we can do about the situation. The short answer is that funders and boards need to think more about their leaders. Today, funders will ask about wellbeing initiatives for staff, but as if those initiatives don't depend on fundraising. And they rarely ask about what provisions are available to support senior leadership. I'm lucky that my board recognises all my hard work and has agreed to pay for a leadership coach—a relationship that has been transformational for my growth. I'm also starting a rest club for feminist leaders in the same position as me.
Chayn is proud to be a proactively anti-racist organisation. What does this mean in practice?
Anti-racism is a practice—a continual journey of learning and growing. Chayn has always been a diverse community in terms of race, ethnicity, and culture. That means we built the organisation on an understanding of oppression and power imbalances. Some of the ways that understanding manifests include:
Analysing the intersectionality in our work, campaigns, messages, and images.
Whenever we speak about gender-based violence, highlighting how race and immigration status impact whether survivors get help or are even believed.
Paying a "globally role-competitive market wage" so everyone gets the same irrespective of where they live.
Cross-checking any assumptions we make about our users based on their location. (This speaks to our design principles: safety, equity and plurality)
Hosting cross-cultural learning sessions to explore civic action, literature, and current struggles and wins from different parts of the world.
Chayn exists to build a feminist future for all. Can you describe what that future looks like and what you will need to build it?
That future is a place free from violence. A place of abundance, care, and freedom.
When it comes to feminist digital futures, we need a transformative shift. We have to change market dynamics from:
profit to safety
polarisation to pluralism
neutrality to accountability
extraction to privacy.
The web should be a place where we can all thrive, access information, build businesses, study, make friends, fall in and out of love, explore our identities, be entertained, and build communities. You'll often hear me talking about the web as a common good—a garden of gardens for all of us. It's up to us to sow seeds of hope and progress in the corners where darkness and dismay fester.
Chayn is doing its part in three ways:
Prioritising the healing of survivors
Discovering, modelling, and documenting best practice
Building new technology with our trauma-informed design principles in mind.
We're actively creating space for complexity and power sharing.
Which three books or other media have had the most significant impact on you as a leader and why?
'Undoing the Politics of Powerlessness' by Yotam Marom
Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearnots. by Brene Brown
'Crisis Text Line and the Silicon Valleyfication of Everything' by Joanne McNeil for Vice — a reminder of what not to do.
More questions for Hera? Get in touch on LinkedIn or subscribe to her new newsletter.
Thanks so much for reading,
Lauren