hi there! I’m Shivani.

I’m a facilitator, advisor, and writer, based in New York City.

I came to this work after a decade inside systems trying to change them from within — in public health, crisis response, organizational strategy, and community-based care. I kept seeing the same pattern: our most persistent strategy problems were really relational problems, rooted in power, story, and unaddressed conflict.

That observation — and a season of rest, grief, and reorientation — led me to build a practice centered explicitly on conflict, power, and repair. I work with senior leaders at justice-rooted organizations, and I write about what I'm learning along the way.

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 facilitator, advisor, and writer, helping justice-rooted organizations bring complex change to life. She is the writer and host of intimate practice, a newsletter on conflict, tending, and transformation.

    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.