Fellows

Aditi has three years of experience in the nonprofit sector and two years experience in the area of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in India. She completed her Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature from Delhi University followed by Master’s in Social Work from Tata Institute of Social Sciences. She interned with two nonprofit organizations in Mumbai, namely Society for Nutrition, Education, and Health Action (SNEHA) for reducing maternal and neonatal deaths, followed by work with Muskaan where she actively counseled children of parents undergoing divorce. Aditi has worked with Save the Children, India as an Institutional Partnership Officer where she was responsible for strategizing inflow of funds from active donors, such as DFID, European Union, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. These donations were used to run programs for reproductive, maternal, new born, child, and adolescent health (RMNCH+A) across fourteen states in India. Previously, as a global graduate of Rio Tinto, Aditi worked in one of the most rural areas of India. She spent two years as a social analyst assessing the needs of people through various on-ground surveys and pre-feasibility studies. She also initiated an innovative project of education through tablet games for children under the influence of drugs. Her major achievements include designing and implementing a multi-year adult education and skill-building program for 315 workers of the company to boost local employment and development.

Host Organization: ChildFund International

Role at Host Organization: Aditi will support ChildFund’s Advocacy team in conducting research and policy briefs, providing operational support, analysis, support to National Offices, and contribute to raising ChildFund’s profile among US government actors and key decision makers.

Akhil holds an honors degree in Economics from Shri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi, and comes with a unique mix of private and social sector experience. In his most recent role, Akhil worked as a strategy consultant with a social enterprise in India to develop and execute their expansion plans, while simultaneously managing their global partnerships. Akhil previously worked as a consultant at two leading global human capital consulting firms, Towers Watson and Marsh & McLennan Companies. At the same time, Akhil managed social impact experiences for students and professionals across the globe. Over the past three years, Akhil’s work involved developing a model for using MBA students and young professionals as pro bono consultants to fill human capital gaps for nonprofits and social enterprises in India. Through this work, Akhil maintained a strong network of nonprofit leaders, pro bono consulting chapter leaders, and MBA program directors at top 10 and Ivy League Universities. With his strong passion for human capital development and social entrepreneurship, Akhil hopes to bridge the talent access gap faced by nonprofits and social enterprises.

Host Organization: Creative Associates International

Role at Host Organization: Akhil will work on business development, partnership management, and communications strategies at Creative Associates, an international development firm. He will be engaged on one of their initiatives called CreativeU, which is positioned as a process to integrate blended learning for “people in development” across the world.

Ankur has an entrepreneurial mindset with a blend of corporate culture (Processes) and startup experience (Result-oriented). He is passionate about analytics and creativity, with an expertise in understanding and managing the integration of marketing, sales, operations, customer service and analytics in order to create effective, meaningful and result-oriented business strategies. As a communications specialist, Ankur takes utmost care in the finer points of both oral and written communication. He finds it incredibly fulfilling to build excellent, high performing teams–individually, we can’t always be at our best but when camaraderie persists, a team can go far. Good teamwork makes every journey better. Ankur also loves to pursue innovation. And while he enjoys connecting the dots across seemingly unrelated information, his MBA has also refined his pragmatic business knowledge to implement explorative growth ideas.

Host Organization: American India Foundation

Role at Host Organization: At American India Foundation, Ankur will be serving as the Executive Assistant Fellow to Chief Executive Officer. In this role, he will act as a key partner to the Chief Executive Officer, helping to brainstorm and identify solutions to challenges faced by the organization. He will develop relationship building skills while managing interactions with external volunteer bodies and board members, and also manage a variety of program design, resource mobilization, marketing, and communication projects across the US and India.

Gargi has more than six years direct experience in anti-human trafficking and youth rights. Since April 2005, Gargi has been a senior program coordinator at CHILDLINE India Foundation where she coordinates and monitors programs in five northern Indian states. Working in 75 cities across India, CHILDLINE is the nation’s first 24-hour emergency phone service for children in need of care and protection. Gargi also assists in the arrest and prosecution of traffickers, for which she has posed as a decoy client and rescued 15 minors from trafficking through police raids in Delhi. Previously, Gargi was the city coordinator for CHILDLINE Delhi (2003-05) and the center coordinator with the Prayas Institute of Juvenile Justice (2001-03), a NGO working for marginalized children, women and youth in India, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Gargi has been invited to speak about her work in trafficking and sexual abuse on many occasions, including a regional trafficking conference in Tokyo, Japan, at the U.S. Embassy in Delhi, and most recently by Scotland’s Strathclyde Police in June 2006. In 2004, she was selected as one of the “50 Dynamic Women” by the U.S. Ambassador in Delhi, and in 2005, was nominated as a Young Indian Professional Leader by the U.S. Embassy. Gargi earned her B.A. and M.A. in history from the University of Delhi.

Host Organization: Ashoka Youth Venture

Manushi Sharma is a global health professional with over seven years of experience in program management and implementation. Through her engagements with – The George Institute for Global Health, The Royal Thai Ministry of Public Health, and The Public Health Foundation of India, she has developed a deep insight into the context and complexities of addressing health system gaps in countries of the global south. Manushi has hands-on experience in supporting and providing strategic leadership for planning, developing, and implementing public health research projects in the developing countries of sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Asia Pacific. Notably, she has published in peer-reviewed journals and has co-authored a book on the economics of non-communicable disease prevention. She has organized and delivered several capacity-building sessions and policy dialogues and presented her work at international conferences. She has liaised and managed partnerships with various stakeholders, including United Nations agencies, the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, governments, and civil society organizations. Manushi is passionate about social entrepreneurship, participatory approaches in social research, and evidence-based policy.

Host Organization: Collaborating for Resilience (CoRe)

Role at Host Organization: As the Learning, Monitoring, and Evaluation Fellow at Collaborating for Resilience, Manushi will gain experience in principles of multi-stakeholder dialogue to promote citizen engagement in policy reform and implementation and will apply these principles through one or more international partnerships. Manushi will manage partner collaborations and undertake action research in one or more program areas, and lead analyses focused on outcome monitoring, learning and evaluation. The Fellow will also help support action research and learning systems that build the capacity of civil society partners to drive governance innovations, distil insights from comparative analysis of outcomes across different partnership sites working towards systems change, and communicate lessons for policy and practice.

Meenakshi has eight years of experience in the development sector. She earned her Bachelor’s of Science followed by a Post Graduate Program in Hospital Administration from IILM Institute and Master of Arts in Psychology from India. Meenakshi was recently involved in the World Breastfeeding Trends Initiative assessment for India. Prior to that, she worked as a program associate in collaboration with UNICEF and the Lady Harding Medical College and Hospital, New Delhi where she developed communication and training materials for maternal, infant and young child feeding practices for communities and frontline healthcare providers. In 2015, Meenakshi worked as a member of Nepal Earthquake emergency response team with Christian Aid and RedR, conducting Multi-Cluster Initial Rapid Assessment of Nutrition and Health sector. Previously, Meenakshi worked as a research associate with UC Berkeley for a study of sensor-enabled cookstoves in Orissa, India. She also worked with the Public Health Foundation of India, engaging in a research study assessing disease burden across India. Meenakshi also worked with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Centre for Communication Programs in India, developing social behavior change communications to promote and support maternal and child health and nutrition. She is passionate about humanitarian aid work, social equality, and positive collaboration.

Host Org: The Nature Conservancy

Fellow role at Parent-Child Home Program: Meenakshi will work as part of the research team at Parent-Child Home Program, focusing on internal and external research projects and data analysis, and leveraging that information to improve home visiting training and practice to prepare young families for school success.

Pragati Singh has over nine years of experience in the fields of public health, gender, and sexual and reproductive rights. She earned a MBBS degree from Maulana Azad Medical College, Delhi University, in 2012, followed by a diploma in organizational leadership from Swedish Institute, Stockholm, in 2018. For her recent project with The Girl Effect, she developed a series of educational videos on sexual and reproductive health & rights for young Indian girls. As Learning & Training Fellow with Girl Up, Pragati’s responsibilities include identification, adaptation, and development of learning and advocacy resources on sexual and reproductive health, rights and justice (SRHRJ) for Girl Up’s youth members, as well as the building out of Girl Up’s learning and advocacy resources and engagement strategy for LGBTQI+ youth. Pragati also supports a variety of other work that the Girl Up team does, such as outreach to increase and measure the impact of Girl Up’s curriculum, “Let’s Talk About Gender-based Violence: Building Awareness and Solidarity.” Her roles have involved advocating for policy change, liaison and partnership building, data interpretation, capacity building, and program management. Pragati has gained hands-on skills in project management, grant management, business development, conference organizing, partnership building, community building, and communications and marketing. She received a number of awards for her visionary leadership, and was recognized by the BBC as one of the world’s hundred most influential, inspiring, and innovative women in 2019.

Host Organization: Girl Up

Role at Host Organization: As the SRHRJ Global Strategy Fellow, Pragati will work closely with the Training & Learning Team at Girl Up to identify, adapt, and develop learning and advocacy resources on sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice for Girl Up’s youth members. The Fellow will also build out Girl Up’s learning and advocacy resources and engagement strategy for LGBTQI+ youth and support ongoing outreach to increase and measure the impact of Girl Up’s curriculum. Additionally, the Fellow will support the development of Girl Up’s programming on mental health and wellness and support the team with planning for in-person engagement.

Saket Mishra earned a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Mumbai in 2007. He has seven years of experience in healthcare marketing as a Creative Director, designing strategy, concept and ideas for pharmaceutical brands and campaigns. Looking to engage in more fulfilling work, he took a sabbatical in 2009 to set up his own nonprofit that launched Maid in India. The project has been a success, raising over $15,000 in grant money, changed 250 lives and reached 1000 households. The project is making revenue of over $10 million and working towards training and employing 1000 maids by 2015. He also helped Online Buddies, a LGBT dating site to launch in India, by helping with strategic partnerships and designing their offline marketing strategy. Saket is a skilled community mobilizer and uses his marketing background creatively to launch grassroots awareness campaigns that engage end users and brings them to the program. Along with strong program management skills and social marketing, Saket is interested and involved in advocacy for labor rights and women’s employment and health.

Host Organization: Massachusetts General Hospital

Role at Host Organization: Saket is joining Partners HealthCare, Center for Connected Health in Boston. The Center is working on technology-based programs to revolutionize the delivery of healthcare and public health efforts in the US. As a fellow, Saket will be executing research pilots for new delivery programs in areas of chronic disease management, cancer care etc. Also, he will contribute to user interface design, and design strategy for new LGBT-based projects, as well as project manage existing projects for their design philosophy.