South Asian Heritage Month 2026

South Asian Heritage Month runs every year throughout July. It is a time to commemorate, mark and celebrate South Asian cultures, histories, and communities. This year's theme is ‘Unity in Diversity.’ South Asia is made up of many different cultures and by focusing on commonalities and celebrating differences, collective power blooms.  

This year we have been hearing from our colleagues about their South Asian heritage and how they feel their heritage informs and impacts the work they do within the domestic abuse sector. Their stories show the power of unity in diversity at Respect, and how it supports us in our vision of creating a world where it is never ok to control, harm or cause fear.   

Learn more about SAHM

What is your role at Respect?  

I’m the Communications Manager at Respect. I work on letting people know about Respect’s mission and work, and campaigns like this! 

How do you describe your South Asian heritage? 

I describe myself as mixed race or South Asian, depending on the context. I’m a second-generation immigrant – my father is from Bangladesh and my mother is from Australia. 

Do you feel your heritage and/or ethnicity inform the work you do or have an impact on it in any way? If yes, could you tell us how? 

For me, it’s felt unavoidable that my experiences and identity inform the way I work and what I do. Many of us work in this sector because we personally feel strongly about the cause, so we bring a lot of ourselves to the job. 

My relationship to my heritage has often felt complicated. Like many mixed-race people, I have struggled to feel I fit in with either side of my family, or the communities around me. I grew up in a majority white, middle class area and wasn’t taught a great deal about Bangladeshi culture and heritage. While I didn’t feel I had a strong connection to it, I was still perceived as South Asian by others, who had questions I couldn’t answer and harsh words and actions I couldn’t understand. 

Going to university helped me broaden my horizons. I met more people from a variety of Black and minoritised backgrounds and found we could connect on shared experiences. I developed my understanding about structural and systemic racism and how my experiences, and those of my extended family, were part of a bigger picture. Since then, I’ve continued to do my own learning and sought out friends with South Asian heritage, who help me understand more about our shared history and the abundance of the South Asian diaspora.  

Bringing this to my work means that I am passionate about amplifying diverse voices and that I always try to think about the impact of bias, discrimination and racism. In the communications team, we need to consider the way we speak about, and visually represent, Black and minoritised people and communities and how it could be interpreted by our audiences.  

Particularly as an organisation that is often referring to perpetrators of domestic abuse, in an environment where the impact of growing Islamophobia and other hate crime is being keenly felt, we need to be mindful that we don’t feed into misinformation and harmful stereotypes. Domestic abuse is everyone’s business, it affects every community, and it will take all of us to tackle it.