Shruti Bora

I’m a psychologist and global mental health researcher working at the intersection of lived experience, youth leadership, research, philanthropy, and systems change. I currently work with Generation Mental Health (GenMH), a youth- and lived-experience-led organisation working to shift power around who gets to produce knowledge, lead initiatives and influence decisions within the mental health landscape towards young people and communities. My work spans organisational strategy, programme design, research and learning, fundraising, partnerships and building infrastructure that enables young people with lived experience to lead in changemaking spaces.

My approach is deeply shaped by my own standpoint as an Indigenous queer person with lived experience of psychosocial disability from a militarised and peripheral region of Northeast India, as well as my training in psychology and experience in global mental health research. I’m particularly interested in the politics of knowledge and power: how research and funding systems reproduce inequality, what meaningful decolonial practice looks like beyond a simple Global North/Global South binary, how internal inequalities and elite capture shape supposedly community-led work, and what it takes to genuinely shift resources and decision-making power toward communities. I’m especially interested in building alternative forms of organisational and funding infrastructure that allow youth-led and community-rooted organisations to grow and have influence without having to reproduce the systems they are trying to change.