About

Speaking on Gender Equity with Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson (2015)

Dilshad Dayani is an educator, author, leadership trainer, feminist activist, and a broadcast journalist.

She is a faculty of Strategic Communication and Negotiation to Enterprise Risk Management at the Columbia University. She is also  the founding president of “World Women Global Council,” and Lead 2 Empower a global platform to empower women by engaging men who facilitate the power of change. It’s unique model of advocacy fueled by a viable support system which focuses on education, leadership, and economic empowerment.

Dilshad has served 3 decades of civic leadership in gender equity as an immigrant. She was the founding Vice-President of advocacy for the United States National Commission-UN WOMEN Dallas Chapter, and has also served as a UN correspondent and president of National Diversity Council for women- Dallas Chapter. Dilshad has served at the State Department building citizen diplomacy and coordinating international diplomats. She has been a communication coach for fortune 500 companies and a community advisor on media for PBS for 8 years.

 As a strategic collaborator, she loves to connect resources that impact scalability. Her mission and passion to impact disadvantaged girls started at the age of 13, when she saved and tutored victims of child abuse in Pakistan and later created youth intervention modules to support girls in Karachi.

When she arrived in Los Angeles as a young married woman in 1992, she supported immigrant mothers by visiting their homes and educating them on various issues and struggles from child development to legal services. After 2 years, she moved to Dallas, TX with her family and started serving disadvantaged multicultural women through the following organizations: Dallas Association of Parenting, Practical Parenting, Plano Educational District and Dallas International Alliance. Later, her diverse affiliations,enabled her to bring awareness, educational tools, and resource mobilization to Empower immigrant families and women of color through her decade long nationally run radio shows.

In 2005, she started a talk show on informed choices in Dallas, a radio talk show with experts to empower immigrant women coming from multicultural backgrounds.The talk shows incorporated research-based information compatible to culture specific issues.She was determined to help and serve the voiceless women who were underserved by many social agencies due to gaps in relevant skill set, communication and cultural bias. 

The specific media initiative brought cost effective interventions reducing mental health issues, and aided as a bridge for social institutions looking for answers to support immigrant parents. She has delivered close to 400 shows influencing more than a million listeners, nationally. Her topics addressed cross-cultural parental communication, awareness on multicultural women’s issues, and advocacy campaigns against domestic violence and strategic communication.Through this process, she collaborated with local law enforcement support initiatives bringing cultural understanding to promote effective delivery of services and initiatives.

Accolades: 

She has won several awards from media to academia. She was honored with the prestigious award for “Outstanding Mentor in Texas” by Women’s International Network, for her untiring efforts as an advocate, community leader, and broadcast journalist for minorities.

She has won distinguished community service awards from “Leading Women America” and outstanding communicator by the Asian Chamber of Commerce. She was also recognized as best women empowerment story teller by South Asian radio stations in NY and Dallas and Global Women Advocate by Our World Media 2014. Recently in July 2015, she received the Obama’s Immigrant Journey award for Professional Excellence in civic leadership for 25 years by Cowles and Thompson in collaboration with Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson’s office.

Dilshad is also the founder of the Lead 2 Empower institute: an impact driven leadership training platform to bridge the gap between business skill set and job opportunities. The certificate programs build sustainable leadership, gender equity, economic empowerment and global diversity. She works with academia, corporations and civil societies to develop and deliver training programs and seminars in order to bring the best experiential learning outcomes. Her Youth Initiative for Women Leadership program continues to empower girl’s leadership and STEM program both here in the US, and in developing regions like India.
Dilshad Dayani has also been an active member on local and national advisory boards, including NPR, KERA, Asia Initiatives NY, Child Literacy NY, Mosaic Human Rights, Global Diversity and Leadership exchange, and Asian Chamber of Commerce Dallas chapter. She has also served as a consultant for few UN projects and mentored as a global thought leader for Kappa Delta Pi, where she did online sessions for teachers around the globe. 

Dilshad holds a Master’s degree in educational leadership from Columbia University and a Doctorate from Northcentral University. She plans to teach Gender Equity in Communication and Business at George Town University this summer. (2016) Dilshad lives with her husband and two adorable sons in NYC.

 

Testimonials

Richard Turner

University Hiring Manager at IBM

Dilshad worked with IBM as a consultant for new university hires during a ‘Communications Camp’. She coached our employees to improve their written and presentation skills through role play exercises. Her leadership experience and insight helped ingrain individual excellence when communicating in client situations. Her sensitivity to the diversity of our audience was vital to creating effective, perceptual improvements for each person she interacted with. She is a dedicated, driven professional and it was my privilege to work with her.

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Conrad Ornstein

CEO of North Texas Council

Dilshad has worked with me for the North Texas Council for International visitors under the State Department as both a professional resource, speaking authoritatively and eloquently on the many issues and challenges faced by new American women, and as a programmer -citizen diplomacy for the organization, putting together professional visitor programs on subjects as diverse as Domestic Abuse and Violence, Women as Institutional Change Agents, and Trafficking in Persons. Dilshad’s knowledge of these areas, and her contacts throughout the North Texas community, have resulted in the opportunity for current and emerging foreign leaders sent to the U.S. under the auspices of the State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program to meet with local experts in these fields, building new professional relationships and helping to foster international understanding.

North Texas is always one of several stops on these short term professional visits. These programs normally take several weeks to put together, assembling local experts to meet with our visitors and attending to the many logistical challenges involved. Dayani has helped us put together some exceptional programs, including one that had to be organized in the space of two days for a visitor group redirected from New York City following Hurricane Sandy. We could not have made this happen without her subject-matter expertise, her diplomatic and organizational skills, and her very substantial efforts.

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Barry Elias

Economic Policy Analyst, Economist and Journalist

Newsmax Contributor and Newsmax Financial Brain Trust Participant; Economic Consultant to Dick Morris (former advisor to President Clinton), Former Consultant to Oppenheimer Capital, Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of New York, and Mellon Bank

During the two years that I have known Dilshad, she has repeated demonstrated a highly admirable, principled, and authentic persona and work ethic. Her overarching vision is to motivate and empower others, especially those in disadvantaged communities, to realize their true potential psychologically, emotionally, socially, and financially.

She presents and articulates her message masterfully: a confluence of humility, compassion, intellect, and insight. She is a true inspiration for immigrant women who struggle to make an impact.

As  a Contributor:

Article written for Huffington Post

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Community Resource Mobilization