Meet Kadir

Hello and welcome to Kolam Creative Collective! I'm Kadir Buvan (he/they), and I started this practice in 2021. I began by offering leadership and career coaching to tech professionals, and over the years this focus has expanded to include politicized art, creative writing, astrology, Tarot, somatics and facilitation. I am a settler on Coast Salish lands, nestled in the mountains and forests and close to the ocean.

My Story

I grew up in TamilNadu, India, and speak தமிழ் Tamil and English. I am caste-privileged. I studied Information Technology as my undergraduate major, and moved from Chennai to New York, San Francisco, then Toronto, working as Software Engineer and then Engineering Manager over my decade of experience in Tech.

Under the surface, I was undergoing a personal revolution. I went to New York in 2014 to attend Recurse Center, a writer's retreat style self-directed programming learning un-school. The intentional norms and culture the founders created there seeded in me a dream for workplaces that were rooted in autonomy, mutual respect and care for each other.

In 2015, I went to San Francisco to work for the Wikimedia Foundation's Analytics and then Operations/SRE teams. I sublet a room from a gay couple in the Outer Sunset, where the air was dense with moisture and it was foggy. Gay marriage was legalized and celebrations of glitter and leather and nudity broke out in the Mission District while I walked through there buying a burrito. I marched in the Pride Parade with the Wikimedia contingent the following year. I didn't know then that I was awakened into my queerness so lovingly by the universe welcoming me with models of loving and proud queerness all around me.

I was a member of Double Union, a feminist maker space and collective in San Francisco. For a book club, we read bell hooks' Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, and I was drawn to and found kinship in the Black Feminist worldview and teachings, and was challenged to look at my own positionality both at the center and the margins. I began to advocate for changes in how people were treated and led in my organization, and talked a lot of peoples' ear off about systemic and cultural change. People mirrored back to me that I would likely be that leader.

In 2018, I moved to Tkaronto, and worked for another tech org as a Site Reliability Engineer with a Manager who wanted to focus more on the technical parts of the job. I asked if I could lead the team and he was happy to switch roles. I became a team lead which then turned into an Engineering Manager role. Although I loved my team, becoming a new leader for a large team across 3 continents was challenging, and I wasn't doing very well in my life. I was going through a divorce, flaring chronic illnesses. Even with some education and coaching available to me in transitioning into my new leadership role, I left after hitting a threshold of burnout.

In the early days of the pandemic, I was looking for another job and although many roles I was interviewing for disappeared, I got hired as Engineering Manager for a team building a cloud infrastructure as a service offering. I had more support and an amazing team, and this time I got to actually feel what it was like to be good at what I do and to shape the norms of leadership in tech — to one of where we could talk about hard things with each other and get to the other side, where Transformative Justice was not a luxury but a practice of rigorous honesty and vulnerability and getting it wrong and trying anyway (this came out of a conversation I had in working 1:1 with Ayana Zaire Cotton at Seeda School). The more I got into the people side of the job, the less I was drawn to the tech side of it. I have always had trouble being told what to do, that didn't help either.

I started on my coaching path through reading a blogpost by Valerie Aurora who started Frame Shift Consulting teaching Ally Skills workshops, where they talked about finding a way out of their technical role through talking to a career coach. "This coaching thing sounds interesting", I thought and went enquiring.

I attended 6 months of in depth coach training with the Academy of Creative Coaching, a Black-owned ICF accredited school in Atlanta, Georgia with remote education and a strong focus on cross-cultural competency and inclusion. I tried to find a path to working as a coach in my organization as a coach. It seemed possible at first, and then it wasn't, and in anticipation of this, I incorporated my business, first as Kolam Coaching Inc.

My first coaching clients were people who were my reports. I did 1:1 work and built experience towards my accreditation. I also ran a 5 person 12 week group coaching program called Confidence and Leadership Skills for Software Engineers which was so powerful in showing me how much we can learn from talking to each other about our experiences when the soft openings are created for dialogue.

I felt called to explore and learn in communities outside of tech after the end of my employment in tech. This took me to artists and poets and queer community spaces and BIPOC spaces and spiritual learning, animism, astrology, Tarot and more. I worked with community organizations in this time offering workshops. I loved teaching Feedback without Fear, for Untapped Leaders who support BIPOC leaders, and Reclaiming Time at Meg Max's writing summer camp supporting neurodivergent writers. I performed at poetry open mics and featured at Queer South Asians' community dinner in Tkaronto, once as a poet and the other time in a group Bharatanatyam performance, that was first debuted for the Paalam Dance Salon at University of Toronto.

As I've come into my trans body over the last few years, this time has also taken me deeper within, into the healing and reclaiming my Self, shadow work, advocacy, nurturing, space making, fire tending, transgressing, reaching for my erotic, my desires, honing my intuition and communication with plants, animals, birds, ancestors and guides. I've been deeply influenced and supported in this deep dive by the works of Black and Indigenous feminist writers and artists — adrienne maree brown, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Bayo Akomolafe and Octavia Butler. I've loved receiving 1:1 coaching from Ayana Zaire Cotton at Seeda School and Ariana Felix on growing into my worldbuilding power and self-sovereignty. My coaching and facilitation toolkit has been greatly supported by Emergent Facilitation training with the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, and Introduction to Liberatory coaching with Coaching for Healing, Justice and Liberation with Sarah Jawaid and Damon Azali.

When I allowed myself to be present in my body and be with earth, my dream of who I was and what I would do in the world to expanded. Languages and ways of knowing that were forgotten came alive in my memory in the form of Astrology and Tarot and dreams and archetypes and myths and symbols. What started as listening to some forecasts grew into a deep love and study of both these practices from a liberatory, decolonial, humanist, embodied and experiential lens. I got to learn Tarot in a 12 week container called Thresholds from Chris Marmolejo, author of Red Tarot, and have gone on to also complete a course on the court cards, Paper Crowns with them. I am learning astrology through self study through the Chart is Body course with Ren Sills at Embodied Astrology and at the Felt Sense School of Evolutionary Astrology with Sabrina Monarch (I'll be in this live program soon). I'm also in group Living the Signs experiential astrology classes at the Hermes-Hestia Center for Living Astrologies and recently started 1:1 lessons with astrologer Samuel Reynolds.

In early 2026, I offered illumi9ate, a 4 week 1:1 program aimed at light-bearing leaders who wanted to connect with the power of their own intution and creative leadership. I had the honor of working with five amazing creative leaders, with whom I went on a transformative journey of lighting up the way to their most loving self and we ended by creating and sharing in a group celebration, poems that everyone made encapsulating their visions coming to life on the last week of illumi9ate.

Tech, art, leadership, Black feminism, coaching, spiritual practice, divination, earth loving — all feed my practice where I weave these strands into braids of liberation. In 2025, I reincorporated as Kolam Creative Collective Inc. - a commitment to this interdisciplinary practice where I work alongside my ancestors, dreaming brave next worlds into being.