Vaishnavi Jayakumar

Vaishnavi Jayakumar co-founded The Banyan in Chennai in August 1993, abandoning an MBA course to do it, and has been its managing trustee since. She was in her early twenties, as was her co-founder Vandana Gopikumar, when the two decided that women with mental illness living on the streets of the city had no service of any kind to turn to and set out to provide one.

They began by renting a three-bedroom house, which they called Adaikalam, Tamil for safe refuge, as a shelter for homeless women with mental illness. What started there became a full model of care: an Emergency Care and Recovery Centre offering clinical treatment and a route back to family or community, through which more than 4,000 people have passed, most of them women; the Home Again programme, recognised by the World Health Organization, under which over 1,000 people have moved out of institutions into shared houses where they choose their housemates and run their own days; and NALAM, a community mental health programme in villages and urban neighbourhoods that has reached over 10,000 people through locally recruited mobilisers. The organisation later opened chapters in Kerala, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, set up the Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health for training and research, ran a helpline with the Chennai police for homeless people with mental illness, and works with state governments on policy; roughly a third of its staff are people with lived experience of mental illness.

Jayakumar has since worked more widely in the disability sector, as a member of the Disability Rights Alliance and a participant in cross-disability advocacy. She campaigned for the legal definition of disability in India to be widened, noting that the list of recognised conditions grew from seven to eighteen under pressure from activists, and argues against the protective instinct that limits what disabled people are permitted to do, pointing to practices such as the refusal of independent bank accounts to people with intellectual disabilities. She favours inclusive mainstream schooling over segregated special schools. The Banyan and its founders have received the Ministry of Women and Child Development's Stree Shakti Puraskar in 2003, the G. D. Birla International Award in 2005 and the WHO Public Health Champion award for India in 2017, among others.[2][3][4][5]