Lavinya’s definition of leadership is “when a person acknowledges that there is a problem and takes the initiative to fix it”, and she has certainly spent her university career living up to this description.

During her first year, Lavinya became SOAS’s first Working Class Officer, as part of the student union. After noticing that a significant number of students (92), all working class or from an ethnic minority, or both, had missed out on bursaries for the university even though they were eligible, she led a campaign called ‘That Way’ to raise awareness and to rectify this issue. The campaign involved organising meetings with school management, galvanising support from other students, putting on demonstrations, sending out emails and partaking in a lot of negotiations and communication with students and staff to outline what the issues were, what changes were needed and how they could support it. The result was a change in school policy and a move to ensure all 92 students received the full amount of money for the three-year bursary.

Following on from this, Lavinya and her team were commissioned to issue a full report of the different kinds of inequalities that students, particularly from working-class and low-access backgrounds, faced.

In her final year, Lavinya, who won the SOAS Student Activist of the Year Award 2019, co-founded a society called Art and the African Mind, which aimed to promote African art and provide African-centred information and education. One of the driving forces behind the society was the organisation of another campaign, this time the ‘decolonisation the curriculum’ campaign. This aimed to make classes more inclusive for black students and included recommendations such as changing the reading lists to include black scholars, and addressing any language and environment that made black students feel inferior or uncomfortable. One victory for the campaign was having the work of radical Guyanese historian and revolutionary Walter Rodney (also a SOAS scholar) showcased at the university.

Lavinya became the first Black Student Officer in SOAS, after pioneering the idea, creating the description and putting it forward in a UGM motion and galvanising support from students.

Lavinya has also created a course called The Black Curriculum, which teaches black British history to 11 to 16-year-olds. She has already partnered with three schools and has a development team in place. As we went to print she was preparing to roll it out in the autumn term.

As the community and communications specialist for the London borough of Lambeth, she created and developed an Electoral Roll communications project encouraging communities to vote as a part of the Equality Commission Strategy.

Here she contributed her ideas to consultation reports and various applications across Lambeth to improve the borough’s work.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

As a CEO of my company.