Shivani Mehta Bhatia
Content Expert, Sexualities, Gender, and Relationships
Shivani Mehta Bhatia is a conflict midwife, equity advisor, and systems strategist. She is the founder of Tulsi Strategies, a transition design studio helping justice-rooted organizations bring complex change to life. She is the writer and host of "intimate practice," a newsletter and podcast on relational skills for systems change.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Shivani led health equity policy for Colorado’s pandemic response from 2020-2021, designing a cross-government strategy that addressed all facets of inequity, from implicit bias trainings for contact tracers to a long-term disability-led economic resilience strategy.
She previously served as the principal investigator and program director for CDC-funded maternal mortality prevention work. Her testimony, policy advising, and programmatic efforts led to the passage of a landmark bill package to support birth equity, as well as expanded Medicaid coverage under the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) for postpartum Coloradans.
Shivani’s public health work was nationally recognized for its cutting-edge strategies to address the structural and social determinants of health, and she was awarded the Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs’ 2020 Emerging MCH Professional Award for Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming.
Over her career, Shivani has been an equity-informed conflict mediator, a crisis counselor for sexual violence survivors, a full-spectrum birth and abortion doula, a trauma-sensitive hatha yoga teacher, a sex educator, and a cognitive neuroscience researcher. She has designed, implemented, and evaluated public health programs in Boston, Denver, New York City, and Mumbai, India.
Shivani holds an MPH from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and an AB from Dartmouth College. Outside of work, Shivani is a textile artist, a queer disabled femme, and an eldest immigrant daughter. She loves rose gardens, fragrant cups of chai, and late summer rainstorms.
Learn more about her at Shivani's website.
My 13-year-old self wearing out my mother’s 1982 copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves is beyond excited to be part of the OBOS lineage — keeping reproductive health equity alive in a time of compounding crises.