Malavika is a teacher, nutritionist, counsellor and business analyst by profession. She is from Mumbai, India and I am fluent in Marathi, Hindi and English. She strongly believes “everyone has a right to live their life peacefully, happily, and achieve full potential for themselves and their family”. She is a staunch feminist and advocate at all levels from individual to organisational in pursuit of human rights and equality for all. She focuses on strengths based approach and lead by example. Has developed an excellent intersectional lens by working with diverse groups of people in Asia, Europe and Australia making it easy to acknowledge the differences, experiences and perspectives that are shaped while interacting with social, political, cultural, and economic systems throughout their journey from home country to Australia.
Malavika started working on the WOMHEn Project as a Bilingual Educator and successfully delivered health literacy sessions in community languages and simple English. Also, delivered Financial Literacy workshops and worked as a Health Promotion Officer in Prevention of Violence Against Women space with Women’s Health In The North. Additionally she worked on various projects like “Speak My Language” Project with ECCV which focussed on service providers and people with lived experience on how they live well with Disabilities and did highest interviews in Victoria in Community Languages.
She currently works at City of Casey as Strategic Lead Gender Equality and is a community facing role. She supports and engages with communities through our Gender Equality Taskforce who are representatives working voluntarily and are passionate and committed to support Council in various initiatives undertaken to support 10 year strategy A safe and Equal Casey to promote Gender Equality and prevent all forms of violence against women and gender based violence. Malavisa works in collaboration with other partners and organisations to make optimum use of resources and support each other to make sure multicultural and diverse communities in Casey are safe and feel supported. This aligns with her values as I am a passionate advocate for the empowerment and progress of multicultural and diverse communities, youth, people from diverse backgrounds (LGBTQIA+), First Nation’s and people with disabilities.
She is also a consumer representative and support research by participating in the co-design approach and as consumer co-lead at WOMEN’S Health Research Translation and Impact Network created by Australian Health Research Alliance.
VicForum 2023 