Sara Kalim
Sara Kalim is Fellow and Director of Development at Somerville College, University of Oxford. She studied Classics at Somerville at a time when the college was still all-female.
She spent 17 years working in the media, working as Head of Development for two major UK television production companies producing documentaries and investigative current affairs programs for the BBC, ITV Channel 4 and HBO amongst others, working across subjects from sleep disorders to the terror attacks in Mumbai, India’s 9/11. She took a special interest in long-form documentaries centered on narratives around women and education including a 3-year long series for Channel 4 focusing on the last all women’s college at Oxford University.
As Director of Development, Sara oversees Somerville’s fundraising strategy and development. She is responsible for campaigns often shaped by Somerville’s catalytic female pioneers, exemplified by her work for the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development with the Indira Gandhi and Cornelia Sorabji Scholarships which sit at the heart of the Centre’s program to enable some of the brightest minds from India to study at Oxford. She works with philanthropists to create transformative educational opportunities for young people. She is a member of the College’s senior management team.
Sara has a long-standing family connection to India, with family coming from Patna, Bihar, where her passion for the furtherment of education in India was inspired by her Indian grandmother, a politician who spent her much of her life campaigning for the social welfare and education of women. Outside of her work for Somerville, Sara is a founding trustee of the Karta Initiative, a social mobility movement for young people at the base of the global income pyramid.
