Season 2 Episode 24: Zainab Salbi: Changing the World through Feminine Leadership with Zainab Salbi

“It's so important. for me that the women's movement right now, not to replicate, not to embody masculine values in the way we're advocating for our rights and freedom.

We live in a world where there’s so much focus on matrix, statistics, and data, and while these are all important, they do not hold the soul of the mission and the vision. They are not the reason for growth or prosperity, but points of information. Zainab believes that a person has to keep their integrity towards the soul of the mission or the vision. Feminine leadership is putting as much importance to the actual mind in the facts as much as to the heart’s knowledge, for the heart has wisdom, knowledge, and intelligence. If we run organizations only using our minds, it becomes broken, disconnected, and unsustainable.

Zainab Salbi has frequently been named as one of the women changing the world by leading publications ranging from Newsweek to The Guardian. Oprah Winfrey identified her as one of the women changing the world to People Magazine and President Bill Clinton identified her as one of the 21st century heroes to Harper’s Bazaar. Most recently Foreign Policy Magazine named her as one of “100 Leading Global Thinkers” and Watkins Magazine identified her as one of the top 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People in 2020.At the age of 23, Zainab founded Women for Women International, a humanitarian organization dedicated to women survivors of wars. Under her leadership (1993–2011), Women for Women International grew from helping 30 women upon its inception to helping more than 420,000 women and distributing more than 100 million dollars in aid. Zainab is the author of several books, including the best seller Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny; Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam (with Laurie Buckland); The Other Side of War; Women’s Stories of Survival and Hope; If You Knew Me You Would Care,(with photographs by Rennio Maifredi); and her latest Freedom is an Inside Job; Owning our Darkness and Our Light to Change Ourselves and the World. She is also the Executive Editor and Host of several shows including Through Her Eyes with Yahoo News, #MeToo, Now What? with PBS, The Zainab Salbi Project with Huffington Post , and The Nida’a Show with TLC Arabia. In early 2022, alongside Jody Allen, Zainab co-founded Daughters for Earth, a new fund and campaign that aims to inspire all women to engage in climate change action by mobilizing $100 million for on the ground, women-led efforts to protect and restore the Earth.

What we discuss…

01:02 – Introducing Zainab Salbi

04:31 – Making the Impossible Possible

09:11 – Joy through Responsibility

15:15 – A Woman Leading with her Cause

18:32 – Zainab’s Journey

27:20 – Visions for Women and the Community

37:27 – Having a Team

44:50 – Zainab’s Work and Daughters for Earth

53:26 – Balancing the Masculine and the Feminine

58:09 – The New Age and the Rise of the Feminine

01:03:59 – Zainab in Behalf of the Great Mother

Learn more from Zainab Salbi: