If you’ve been following our work, you may already be aware that the Victorian Women’s Trust digs research. Feminist research, to be specific. That’s precisely why someone like sociologist and academic, Richa George, makes sense as the newest addition to our team. With a background in comprehensive community engagement projects, Richa will be bringing her feminist warmth and impact investigation chops to the table as our new Grants and Community Impact Manager.

We’re delighted to have her on board, and know that our longstanding grants program — going strong for over 40 years! — will benefit from her deft insights.

“Sociologist, researcher, and incurably curious person — more often than not, you’d find me deeply immersed in Wikipedia rabbit holes about anything from the morbid to the mundane. I’ve also had a slightly circuitous career — engineering, operations, international development, academia — which means I’ve accumulated an oddly useful collection of skills and experiences along the way. Just your average Johannes factotum.”

“Research helps us ask better questions, and gives us some pretty good ways of answering them: where need exists, whose experiences are being overlooked, and whether what we fund is actually making a difference. But only when it sits alongside lived and community knowledge. Good grantmaking, I’d say, should be curious, evidence-informed, and earnestly willing to learn.”

“The sheer breadth of it. ‘To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing’ — it’s a quote I love by Raymond Williams. There is something incredibly hopeful about encountering grassroots movements with an idea for making life safer, fairer or more expansive, and then being able to resource that idea into existence.”

What grounds your feminism?

“Care, more than anything. A mildly inconvenient inability to stop noticing power and injustice. And underneath that, a simple, unshakeable belief that all people deserve dignity, safety, autonomy and expansive lives. Maybe that’s what keeps me from quite accepting the world as it is.”