Thursday, November 18, 2021
4:00pm – 5:30pm
Virtual Event

Sushma’s ESRG Lecture will draw on her co-authored book (along with Bill Schulz, former executive director of Amnesty International USA and Carr Center Senior Fellow), The Coming Good Society: Why New Realities Demand New Rights (Harvard University Press 2020). Drawing on their vast experience as human rights advocates, the authors challenge us to think hard about how rights evolve with changing circumstances. To preserve and promote the good society – one that protects its members’ dignity and fosters an environment in which people will want to live – we must at times rethink the meanings of familiar rights and consider the introduction of entirely new rights.

Sushma Raman is the executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. She brings over two decades of global experience launching, scaling, and leading social justice and philanthropic programs and collaboratives, building capabilities of grassroots human rights organizations and their leaders, and teaching graduate courses in the public policy schools at UCLA, USC, Tufts Fletcher School, and Harvard Kennedy School. Sushma has worked at the Ford Foundation, where she helped launch and scale social justice and women’s funds around the world, and at the Open Society Foundation, where she was a Program Officer on the founding staff for US Programs on immigrant and refugee rights. She was a Fellow with the German Marshall Fund and the UCLA Luskin School, and is currently a member of the board of RFK Human Rights, established by the family of Bobby Kennedy. She has taught graduate courses on economic justice; inter-sectoral leadership; philanthropy and nonprofit management; global civil society, the NGO sector, and the state; and policy communications for decision-makers.