In Pooja Sharma’s Own Words — from JYNM: “The Power of Allyship: Building an Inclusive Duniya”

“You don’t need a label to be able to offer support. You need to understand a child to offer support to them.”

— Pooja Sharma

I spent fifteen to seventeen years in corporate finance, starting at an investment bank, before quitting to move into disability inclusion work. I’m a neurodivergent adult myself — diagnosed only after I’d already immersed myself in the field — and a sibling to my brother Vishal, who has an intellectual disability.

I founded the Sarvodya Collective, which runs the ongoing Inclusive Duniya campaign. This is my organization’s fifth year. I came to this work not as an outside expert, but as a sibling who grew up inside it, and later discovered I was neurodivergent myself.


1. It Started With 40,000 Steps in My Room

During COVID, in August 2020, the same month I turned forty, I launched an impromptu awareness campaign — walking 40,000 steps in my room, inspired by Captain Tom’s NHS fundraiser walk. More than eighty people across twelve Indian cities joined by walking, cycling, or doing push-ups while I posted daily content for thirty-one days. That became the seed of my organization. The following year, I distilled the questions people had asked into twenty-one themes and turned them into an illustrated comic series, Inclusive Duniya, painted by a reconnected childhood classmate. It went viral among parents and siblings for being direct and respectful, instead of tentative, about disability.

2. Being Vishal’s Sibling Taught Me Care Runs Both Ways

Vishal was my closest companion growing up — we learned cycling together, played badminton. On childhood road trips in a non-AC car, he’d let me sleep on his shoulder and gently wipe off my sweat. As adults, he made me tea before a trip after a rocky patch between us, and stayed up until midnight to greet me when our elder brother was hospitalized. The highlight moments are simple, mutual acts of care, not one-directional. I only recognized, in adulthood, a quiet childhood longing for the extra nightly attention my mother gave Vishal’s speech therapy — both things can be true at once.

3. I Didn’t See My Own Neurodivergence Until I Was Deep in This Work

I only began suspecting my own neurodivergence in 2020, while immersed in inclusion work. It traces back to my marriage — my then-husband and I didn’t know he was autistic until I read a 2015 magazine issue on autism and thought, this sounds just like him. Discomfort in leather-soled shoes on cobbled streets, distress at bedside lamps and noise, suddenly made sense. Had we known earlier, we might have shown up differently for each other. Women are culturally conditioned to mask — to be bubbly, accommodating — which delays their own diagnoses. I didn’t connect my own sensory anxiety around crowds and noise to neurodivergence until years into my advocacy work.

4. Allyship Is Ordinary People, Not Just Experts

Neuro-inclusion isn’t only the job of experts and policy. I design not for fifty students plus one excluded child, but for one among fifty — Universal Design for Learning principles that benefit everyone, across languages, backgrounds, nutrition levels. Micro-advocacy matters: small daily actions like inviting someone to join you, checking in, making sure a birthday party doesn’t leave a child out. I deliberately bring outsiders — student leaders, volunteers, teachers — into a space historically run only by affected families, so disability advocacy doesn’t stay a lonely journey confined to parents alone.

Tools & Strategies

• Inclusion Circles — a loosely structured, facilitator-led format used with 9-to-12-year-olds to build understanding of neurodiversity and allyship.
• Universal Design for Learning (UDL) — designing for everyone’s variance from the outset, not retrofitting for one excluded child.
• Tuesdays with Teachers — a campaign delivering bite-sized, India-specific teacher training, bypassing gatekept professional development.
• Micro-advocacy — everyday small actions rather than waiting for systemic or policy change.

Take the time you need to anchor into your whole being. Drop some of that self-talk and self-labeling and learn to embrace yourself with self-compassion. Find your own tribe of supporters. Positive policy framework actually becomes real when individuals step up.

Listen to the full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=p1Jti_k0PLM

Topics covered: #Neurodivergence #Allyship #InclusiveDuniya #SpecialSiblings #DisabilityIndia #Masking