Dashni Sathasivam is a policy program manager in the Race and Equity Division at the Urban Institute. She leverages her expertise in health equity, equity-centered policy reform, and community-responsive systems transformation. In her current role, she leverages her expertise to manage the Unequal Treatment at 20 project and the Lancet Commission on Antiracism in Solidarity, as well as to support research and analysis of federal equity initiatives.
Formally, Sathasivam served as the manager of policy and outreach at Health Equity Solutions, a Connecticut-based advocacy nonprofit advancing health equity through antiracist policies and practices. Her policy portfolios and advocacy experience include the community health worker workforce; granular race, ethnicity, and language data collection; hospital community benefit requirements; and health information exchange consent policies. Sathasivam’s role as the Latino outreach coordinator with the University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center’s Cancer Health Disparities Initiative and service as a City Year Milwaukee AmeriCorps member informed her community-based participatory approach to health and partnership building.
Sathasivam holds a bachelor’s degree in gender and women’s studies and Spanish from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a master’s degree in public health in health policy from the Yale School of Public Health.