Who We Are — Sisters in Leadership Training

S.I.L.T.

No to Racism, Patriarchy and Mindless Competition

Banafsheh Madaninejad, SILT founder and trainer

OUR STORY

Imagine a cool, breezy March Saturday morning in Austin, TX. You’ve been invited to attend a women’s leadership workshop run by an expert in the field. It’s the last semester you’re teaching race and gender as a philosophy professor at a Liberal Arts college. You decide to attend the workshop because you can’t wait to see how women’s leadership training is done by the real experts outside academia.

Then, imagine you attend but find out that the women who are ready to take over the world are being asked to mimic alpha male affect and behavior instead of being invited to be themselves. This is what happened to our Founder, Banafsheh. She came home after that workshop, and created her own women’s leadership training based on the same intersectional training she had been sharing with her students. Banafsheh then tapped into the collective wisdom of her fellow sister-trainers to create a movement to revolutionize the workplace…

…and that is how SILT was born.

We believe that Sisterhood Transforms Organizational Culture (STOC).

We take STOC of our intuition,

**we already know how to make our home, work and world better.**

We take STOC knowing that building and spending time in sisterhood,

is healing, joyful and can even be euphoric.

We take STOC understanding,

that sometimes we’d rather pass the baton, lift another sister up and rest and that (wait for it…) that. is. healthy.

We take STOC appreciating,

that an ethics of care builds our humanity while domination and competition destroy it.

We take STOC knowing,

that alone we might feel helpless but in deliberative sisterhood we are empowered to transform our environments.

We take STOC of a “journey” towards liberation,

and understand that the journey is not one we can achieve in a day… or alone.

We take STOC of a changing tide,

and know that the time for change is here and that we are its agents.