Pragya has seven years of experience in the nonprofit sector and holds a Master’s degree in Social Entrepreneurship from Tata Institute of Social Sciences as well as a Post Graduate Diploma in Counselling and a Bachelor’s degree in Commerce from University of Lucknow. As part of the Fellowship team at Ashoka Innovators for the Public (Ashoka), Pragya helped design and implement leadership development and strategic planning programs to help scale impact of Ashoka and Ashoka Fellows across India. She designed two new programs – Changemaker Dinner (CMD) and Half-Time conversations to facilitate collaboration between social, business, media, and government leaders. She has organized over 30 of these events across India connecting over 500 leaders and resulting in several partnerships. She also launched Ashoka Support Network program in India to raise unrestricted funds for Ashoka and enable business leaders use their core competencies for solving social problems. Prior to Ashoka, Pragya was awarded Rural Transformation Fellowship to work towards community empowerment. She lived in an indigenous village for three years and helped establish micro enterprises to tackle under-nutrition, generating livelihood, and led a grass-root movement to build first school in the village. In 2011 Midory co-founded a social enterprise, Saudaagar, for creating dignified livelihood options for differently-abled people. This was recognized as grass-root innovation by Confederation of Indian Industries in 2013. Through her experience, Pragya has learnt to engage with diverse stakeholder for co-creating solutions. She is interested in social entrepreneurship, social impact strategy and leadership development.
Host: Atlas Corps
Fellow Role at Atlas Corps: Pragya will support the overall strengthening of leadership development in the nonprofit sector by helping to expand the American Express Leadership Academy franchise. She will coordinate and grow the alumni network; manage and coordinate the global Alumni Summit, and help develop and improve communication.