Dr Sunita Gautam wears a lot of hats.
She is an educationist, local community board member, business mentor, Justice of the Peace, Marriage & Civil Union Celebrant and mom of two teenagers. Dr Gautam takes great satisfaction in each of her positions and is working hard to change Christchurch's ethnic makeup by promoting inclusiveness and diversity.
Dr Gautam has recently been named a finalist for the Women in Governance Awards 2022.
Women on Boards New Zealand, in partnership with Governance New Zealand, presents the award each year to women and organisations who have contributed significantly to gender diversity on boards, including governance leaders, directors, change-makers, and rising stars.
Dr Gautam was born in Uttar Pradesh and moved to various places in India as her father worked in a transferable job in NTPC. She comes from a traditional small-town family, where the final destination of a girl child was to get married. Dr Gautam had to fight against societal norms to pursue her Master’s degree and followed it up with an MBA.
She says, that she has always felt a moral responsibility to pursue education, land a good profession, and dispel gender norms to set an example for other women in her family to follow. Early on she understood that education is the route to independence in allowing her to make her own decisions. She promised herself that she would get the highest possible degree.
After a typical Indian arranged marriage, she relocated to Christchurch, New Zealand. Dr Gautam started her work life in Christchurch as a casual worker in the Warehouse in the year 2006. She decided to pursue an early childhood teacher qualification from the University of Canterbury after being rejected for several full-time jobs. She received numerous rejection letters stating she is overqualified. While studying she also started working in the preschool and with her astute business sense, she rapidly advanced to a managerial position and worked in the ECE industry for more than seven years. Following her passion for business and management, she then joined a tertiary college to teach business management courses. While teaching, she also interacted with many international students. It gave her tremendous pleasure to guide the young students, who sometimes feel lost in a foreign country. Guiding and mentoring have become a source of immense satisfaction for Dr Gautam as she also mentors local Christchurch business owners. This entails assisting them not only with professional challenges like marketing, sales and finance but also with personal issues.
She completed her PhD at the University of Canterbury. As a part of her doctorate study, she set to deconstruct the immigrant entrepreneurship theories and compare them with today's ground realities for immigrant business owners. Studies on immigrant entrepreneurship in New Zealand are limited, more so for a single ethnic group in New Zealand. Dr Gautam’s research focused on self-employed Indian immigrant entrepreneurs in New Zealand. For this, she recorded ‘the start-up journeys’ of several Indian migrant business owners throughout the country. She says, "While the process was gruelling, it gave me tremendous insights of immigrant entrepreneurs' journey, their motivations, challenges, barriers and enablers."
Dr Gautam’s research has developed an updated theoretical (immigrant entrepreneurship) framework and an Indian immigrant entrepreneurship model, which can be measured against real-world settings. As New Zealand is a big importer of skilled immigrants and utilises such skilled immigrants’ impacts on future prosperity. The theoretical framework developed in Dr Gautam’s study can serve as a guide for the Immigration Department and the Chamber of Commerce in developing new immigration policies that will accommodate diverse entrepreneurs in New Zealand. Dr Gautam’s research also sheds light on "The general perception of Indians only owning dairies or driving taxies is thankfully changing with high visibility of some of the migrant business owners," Dr Gautam says.
Taking note of her research, the local Labour party invited her to be involved in policy design. This was her first involvement with active politics and her work impressed the party members so much that they encouraged Dr Gautam to get more involved and run for the local body elections.
With a strong conviction that the community needs to have a seat at the table where decisions are made that affect us. The first time she contested from the Central ward to represent at Linwood-Central-Heathcote community board in 2019 and lost by 100 votes. She got another opportunity in 2020 to contest at by-elections and this time Dr Gautam won by 600 votes and became the first Indian woman to be on community board member in New Zealand.
"It is a great privilege to represent the community and to act as an advocate for the interests of our people. Through the role, I have been able to contribute to a wide range of causes, people and the wider community," Dr Gautam says. She also feels that having diversity on the community board will represent the real New Zealand and therefore she is actively motivating and encouraging more diverse faces to be on the board or governance, specifically ethnic women. We all have an important role to play in making our communities thriving, vibrant and safe,” Gautam says
Besides the Local board responsibilities and a full-time job at Ara Institute of Canterbury, she also finds time to be involved in various community initiatives. She is particularly passionate about assisting women who have been the victims of domestic violence, encouraging people to be involved in local community initiatives, promotes education and businesses. Dr Gautam is an optimist, and she feels the new generation of migrants will herald a new era in New Zealand where diversity will be normal. According to Dr Gautam, our culture is a strength and should guide us forwards. Additionally, we must promote our Indian heritage beyond just cuisine, clothing and Bollywood dance.
As an Indian-origin New Zealander, Dr Gautam strives for the best of both worlds and wholeheartedly practices her Indian values of Tyaga (renunciation), dana (liberal giving), nishtha (dedication), Satya (truth), ahimsa (non-violence) and upeksha (forbearance) and her New Zealand values of Manaakitanga (kindness, caring, and hospitality), Whanaungatanga (positive relationships & community), Kaitiakitanga (guardianship and preservation) and Kotahitanga (unity and shared sense of belonging) through her various roles. After all, it starts from an individual to "Be the change you wish to see in the world": Dr Sunita Gautam