Vandana Gopikumar

Vandana Gopikumar co-founded The Banyan in Chennai in 1993, when she and Vaishnavi Jayakumar, then both students, rented a three-bedroom house they called Adaikalam — Tamil for safe refuge — as a shelter for homeless women living with mental illness. The premise, unusual at the time, was that women found on the streets in acute distress needed not custody but treatment, a home and a route back to a life of their own choosing.

Over three decades she has built the organisation outward from that house into a set of interlocking services: Emergency Care and Recovery Centres, where more than 4,000 homeless people with mental illness, most of them women, have been treated; Home Again, a supported-housing programme recognised by the World Health Organization under which over 1,000 people, sixty per cent of them women, have moved out of institutions into shared homes where they choose their housemates; and NALAM, a community mental health programme run by grassroots mobilisers, many with their own experience of illness, which has supported over 10,000 people. In 2007 she helped establish the Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health, which from 2013 has run master's programmes in clinical psychology, applied psychology and social work with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

Her method has been to put people with lived experience of mental illness inside the organisation rather than only in front of it: about eighty per cent of the workforce are women and roughly a third are people who have themselves experienced mental illness, so that new arrivals are met by staff who have been where they are. She has also worked on the policy side, serving on India's first Mental Health Policy Group, where she pressed the case of the most vulnerable and of last-mile service delivery. The Banyan's evidence base and partnerships have led to its models being adopted in ten Indian states and two other low- and middle-income countries. She continues as managing trustee, mentoring the leadership of both The Banyan and the Banyan Academy.[2][3][4][5]