hi there! I’m Shivani.

I’m a conflict midwife, equity advisor, and systems strategist, based in New York City.

I founded Tulsi Strategies, my transition design consultancy, after a decade working across public health, crisis response, organizational strategy, and community-based care. I saw the same pattern everywhere I went:

our most persistent “strategy problems” were really relational problems — rooted in power, story, and unaddressed conflict.

Before launching Tulsi, I spent years inside systems trying to change them from within.

Over my career, I’ve been a health equity expert for the COVID pandemic response, a leader in maternal mortality prevention, an innovation consultant, 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 studying the effects of music education on brain plasticity.

Across all of it, I saw a need for justice work that bridges the personal and the political, the embodied and the embroiled, the human and the systemic. That insight — and a long season of rest, grief, and reorientation — led me to build a practice centered explicitly on power, repair, and relational skill.

Through Tulsi Strategies, I support justice-rooted leaders, teams, and organizations as they navigate conflict and complex change.

My work lives at the intersection of:

  • relational skills: how we understand power, emotions, story, harm, and repair

  • organizational strategy: collective decision-making, liberatory pedagogy, and the lived experience of culture

  • transition design: designing for long-term, systemic, equitable change

I help teams build the capacity and structures that make new worlds possible — not as metaphor, but as practice.

My approach to conflict work is unapologetically intersectional and deeply rooted in healing, history, and human complexity.

I believe that:

  • relationships are the infrastructure of systems change.

  • repair is a practice and an invitation towards vulnerability.

  • power can be stewarded with integrity, not just wielded in oppression.

  • the antidote to violence is resonant, relational connection.

  • birth, sex, and death work teach us the skills we need for every threshold.

This is the foundation of my transition design practice: tending the human, relational, and structural edges that make new futures possible.

Conflict is structural intelligence.

This is the liberatory promise of conflict: it offers us the raw material to redesign how we relate, decide, and build something new.

Conflict shows us where power has pooled, where stories have calcified, and where we demand evolution. It reveals the next right layer of repair, redesign, or reorientation.

This is systems change made visible.

  • 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.

Looking for something more formal? Click below for my professional bio.