Being Bonterra: Amit Motwani on a life and career shaped between worlds

Amit Motwani grew up in Houston as the only South Asian kid in a predominantly Black neighborhood, speaking one way at home, another with friends, and a third way at school, with what he calls “the accent neutrality of a news anchor.” He and his siblings didn’t realize they were code-switching. They didn’t have the word for it yet. It was just how they moved through the day.

Decades later, that instinct — the ability to hold multiple worlds at once and translate between them — has shaped how Amit shows up, personally and professionally. As an engagement director at Bonterra, he draws on a career that has crossed boundaries few others do: from the early days of nonprofit SaaS to teaching GED classes at a youth shelter; from the C-suites of leading nonprofits to three years hitchhiking across Latin America.

For Amit, AAPI Heritage Month is an invitation to name what those years between worlds taught him, and to examine what still goes unsaid.

Being named and seen

When Amit first recalls learning of AAPI Heritage Month many years ago, he wasn’t sure how to feel — his instinct was to question.

My first reaction was, wait, really? So we’re all lumped into one group now? The Asian diaspora is so broad and complex that the umbrella felt reductive at first.

He soon came around, and his reasoning is worth sitting with. There is something powerful, he says, about simply being named. At minimum, it’s a proxy for being seen. He distinctly recalls first seeing someone of his ethnicity on television.

Though he wasn’t meant to own one, he remembers the first time he saw a toy in stores that featured a skin tone closer to his — Cabbage Patch Kids, he emphatically notes. He thinks about the moment emojis offered different tones, and how immediately and instinctively everyone reached for the one that matched.

The need to be seen and reflected, it’s real. It’s human. Having a month that feels like yours, set apart to honor your contributions and your ancestors’ contributions to this remarkable American culture that we share, that matters.

It matters for another reason, too. The AAPI movement, Amit is quick to point out, would not exist without the suffering, resilience, brilliance, and organized action of the Black American civil rights movement. “We’re standing on shoulders here,” he says, recognizing that debt of acknowledgement is an important part of what the month means to him.

The stories still waiting to be told

Ask Amit which AAPI stories remain underrepresented, and he will walk you through several layers of American history most people have never learned.

Filipino sailors settled in communities in Louisiana as far back as the 1700s. Chinese laborers built the transcontinental railroad under brutal conditions. Japanese Americans served in some of the most decorated military units in U.S. history while their families sat in internment camps on American soil. “These are foundational American stories,” Amit says, “that most Americans, including a lot of Asian Americans, don’t know.”

And there is one name he will not let go unsaid: Balbir Singh Sodhi was a Sikh man from Punjab who built a gas station in Mesa, Arizona. On the morning of September 15, 2001, four days after the Twin Towers fell, he donated to the 9/11 victims’ fund. Later that same day, he was shot and killed in his own parking lot because he looked like “the enemy” to someone who did not know the difference. He was not Afghan. He was not Muslim. He was Sikh.

Balbir Singh Sodhi deserves to be a household name in this country. He’s not. And that silence alone is a story worth telling.

The pattern of Asian communities being scapegoated during moments of national crisis or economic anxiety is not confined to the past. Amit saw it again in the surge of anti-Asian hate during COVID-19. He sees echoes of it now in the current administration’s immigration posture, which he describes as carrying a real and traumatic weight for South Asian families. Professionals, many of them people he works with and among, are suddenly living with uncertainty, wondering if the terms of their belonging are being rewritten around them. And then there are people like him, South Asian Americans who grew up in low-income, predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods, who don’t fit the model minority template and get erased twice: once by mainstream America, and sometimes within their own communities.

That’s why the AAPI movement matters to me. Not despite the breadth of our diaspora, but because of the depth of it.

A career, and a calling, across borders

Amit started on the tech side of the social good sector. He was CTO on the startup team of CTK, the company that built Apricot, one of the leading nonprofit case management platforms and still a flagship Bonterra product today. In those early SaaS days, he learned the work soup to nuts, from infrastructure to implementation. But even in a top role at a thriving startup during the internet boom, something nagged at him.

I kept looking across the table at our nonprofit customers and thinking, wow, they’re doing the real work. And here I am selling them software. Is this the right place for me to be?

That question, combined with his own experience growing up in a low-income neighborhood in Houston, eventually pulled him across the table. He remembers the exact moment, while also serving as managing director in the UK, that he knew he needed to come back to the United States and enter direct service. He returned to Austin and joined the youth shelter where he had already been volunteering, this time as a GED instructor for young people who had been removed from the school system or sent over from the juvenile justice system. It was his entry into direct human service, by way of adult basic education and literacy.

Then came 2003, and the decision to invade Iraq. Amit watched what he calls the moral passivity that allowed the country to go to war on mistaken information, and what he couldn’t shake was the sense that the people who might suffer as collateral damage were being treated as “just some Brown people on the other side of the world, whose lives carried different or lesser value.”

If we could do that to them, and people think we all look the same, then my people are next. And aren’t we all our people?

A year later, disappointed by the absence of policy change, he chose to leave the country. He sold his car, his only possession, and spent the next three years hitchhiking from Mexico to Argentina, working whatever jobs he could find, cementing his Spanish, deepening his affinity for Latin American culture. Identity and belonging had always been live questions for him — as a child, he noticed on maps and globes that India and Mexico were both often colored burnt orange, roughly the same size on seemingly opposite ends of the world, and wondered if other similarities he saw were signs of cultural kinship: the flatbreads, the stews, the brown shades of skin. He had felt an inexplicable connection then. Years later, he was living it.

He came back changed. More certain of what he valued, why he valued it, and where he wanted to put it to work.

Finding Bonterra, and finding the right room 

When Amit returned to the United States, he built a career across direct service and philanthropic leadership, including an ascending run of C-suite roles: CIO at United Way, COO at a major Latinx immigrant services nonprofit, and CEO of a global humanitarian organization — experiences that directly informed his board service on critical policy bodies like the Travis County Hospital District. But even with deep expertise, he noticed something persistent: ideas that would have landed differently from someone who looked or sounded different had to work harder to find their audience.

I felt the model minority myth operating in reverse. The assumption that someone like me belonged in a technical or operational role, not as an ideator driving strategy. It wasn’t overt. It shows up in whose ideas get repeated back as insights, whose tone gets read as passion versus aggression, and who gets invited into the rooms where decisions are made.

In 2024, after years of caring for his parents through health challenges and pushing through his own, Amit took a sabbatical. It was, he says, a culturally counterintuitive decision given the Asian propensity to simply keep working. But it gave him the space to ask what really mattered. During that time, a friend mentioned an opportunity at a place called Bonterra, supporting a high-profile community-based gun violence reduction initiative that was running on Apricot, the very product he had helped build more than a decade earlier.

The full-circle nature of it wasn’t lost on him. But what surprised him most was how quickly the mission alignment felt mutual.

Bonterra felt like a place where my whole self was relevant. Not just the technical background, but my lived experience, my perspective, my voice. That’s not something I take for granted.

In a little over a year, Amit has watched that culture show up consistently: in the executive-level commitment to DEIB under Chief DEIB Officer Dionn Schaffner; in CEO Scott Brighton’s North Star goal of moving giving to three percent of GDP by 2033; and in his colleagues modeling the behavior the company hopes to encourage across the sector. For Amit, that consistency is what makes the difference between a company that talks about impact and one that actually moves toward it.

Advice for the next generation 

When asked what he would tell the next generation of AAPI professionals, Amit offers four things, delivered with the humility of someone who insists he is still on the journey himself.

Hold the AAPI umbrella with both hands. Use the collective identity as leverage for representation, policy, and seats at the table, but stay nimble enough to disaggregate and acknowledge each community’s specific needs. “Solidarity and specificity,” he says, “don’t have to be opposites.”

Know the shoulders you’re standing on. The AAPI movement did not emerge in a vacuum. Acknowledge that debt often, and pay it forward, within AAPI communities and across the broader coalition working toward justice and belonging.

Look inward, honestly. Colorism and anti-Blackness exist in the broader world, and within our own communities too. Naming them openly isn’t a betrayal. It’s how we get stronger.

And do it all with grace. Make space for mistakes, including your own. Not everyone arrives at understanding through the same path. The goal, he says, isn’t purity. It’s growth.

Your whole story, including the parts that don’t fit the model minority myth, including the parts that are complicated and hard to explain, that’s what makes you valuable. Bring all of it.

That, in the end, is what being Bonterra looks like for Amit Motwani: staying rooted in every world he’s moved through, and leading from there, helping people who do good — do it better.