Parul Bajaj, the outgoing executive director of the Nissan Foundation, is a proud Indian-American who shared her goals for fostering cultural diversity within the organization. She successfully orchestrated the 30th anniversary Nissan Foundation Symposium that she has been actively planning for the last year. All the Nissan Foundation grantees were in the same room for the first time.
Bajaj was able to share how the event impacted her as it brought back memories from childhood.
Which panel conversations moved you the most?
The conversation that resonated with me the most was about correcting our biases about other cultures. So, I’m Indian-American and was born and raised in Mississippi. The number of times that I’ve heard people ask me if I was the feather Indian or the dot Indian or have misperceptions of what the Indian culture is, it’s too frequent to count. The way that these nonprofits are working to reclaim some of those cultural narratives resonated with who I was and took me back to my childhood almost.
What went into bringing this symposium to fruition?
This has been a year in the making. If not more than a year in the making. It has been a great collaborative approach with several people across the company to bring together the right speakers, brainstorm the questions for the panel discussions, and just make sure it was not only about the conversations that were happening inside the room for those panels but also creating and cultivating those environments for networking as well. It’s the first time that all of our grantees have been in a room together.
How can the community help continue what the Nissan Foundation has already put into place?
I think anytime that you’re curious about the world that you live in and open to different perspectives and ideas, you’ve already taken the first steps in that journey. I would encourage anyone that’s viewing this to go and check out the Nissan Foundation website. There you’ll see a list of all of our 2022 grantees and you can click on the links, and visit their websites and they have resources for you to check out.
