Social sector organizations need strong Boards and Advisory Councils for leadership, strategic inputs, functional guidance, fundraising support, mentorship, and overall governance. In advisory and Board roles, senior corporate leaders can add tremendous value to development organizations by leveraging their networks, applying best practices from the corporate sector, and tapping into their skills and resources.
The ILSS Board Leadership Program is a bridge between Social Purpose Organizations and experienced corporate talent to kickstart their social impact journey. Through a curated learning experience, participants become part of a network of leaders and changemakers looking to enhance their knowledge, join nonprofit Boards, and make a difference through informed leadership.
Participants begin their learning journey with a robust two-day virtual intervention, where they:
Understand and decode India’s development sector landscape
Investigate personal alignment with causes and identify skill sets that you can contribute as a board member
Gain first hand exposure to experienced board members and voices of development
Understand the importance of board’s role and leadership
Navigate compliances and regulations vis a vis. board governance
Learn formulae of building effective board partnerships with the organization leadership
Amit Chandra joined Bain Capital as a Managing Director in early 2008, and is a part of the firm’s leadership team in Asia. He received his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from VJTI, Bombay University, post which he worked at India’s leading engineering & construction firm, Larsen & Toubro. He then received his MBA from Boston College and was awarded the school’s Distinguished Alumni in 2007. Prior to joining Bain Capital, Amit spent most of his professional career at DSP Merrill Lynch, a leading investment bank in India. He retired from DSP Merrill Lynch in 2007 as its Board Member & Managing Director, to move to Private Equity. Mr. Chandra was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2007 and was named in Asia’s Heroes of Philanthropy list by Forbes in 2016, along with his wife Archana. He is currently or in the past has served as a Member of the Board of Directors of a number of leading companies, like Tata Sons, Genpact, L&T Finance, Emcure Pharmaceuticals, Piramal Enterprises, and Tata Investment Corporation. He is also active in India’s not for profit space, and is or has been associated as a Trustee of the Tata Trusts, as a Founder/Board Member of Ashoka University, a Board Member of Give India and The Akanksha Foundation. He also a Member of the Advisory Boards of Bridgespan in India, the Centre for Social Impact & Philanthropy, and Swades Foundation.
Ashish Dhawan is Founder and Chairman of Central Square Foundation (CSF) and a Founding Member of Ashoka University. Prior to this, he worked for twenty years in the investment management business and ran one of India’s leading private equity funds, ChrysCapital. In June 2012, he left his full-time role at Chrys Capital to start CSF to pursue evidence driven and innovation led system reform in school education. Ashoka University is a not for profit university that aims to offer an Ivy League-quality undergraduate programme in India, based on the US liberal education system. Ashish is also the founder of two new organisations to address the talent gap in the social sector – ISDM: A development management institute and ILSS: A program to transition experienced corporate talent into the development sector. More recently, Ashish has also created the Foundation for Economic Development (FED) to focus on policy reform in the agriculture sector. He also serves on the board of several non-profits including 3.2.1 Education Foundation, Teach For India, Centre for Civil Society, Bharti Foundation and India School Leadership Institute, Network for Quality Education, Khan Academy India, and Social Finance India. He is an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School and a dual bachelor’s (BS/BA) holder with Magna Cum Laude honours from Yale University. He is on the Chair of India Advisory Board of Harvard Business School and a member of Yale’s Development Council.
Gautam John is the Director of Strategy at Nilekani Philanthropies. Prior to this, he spent several years in the development sector and was a TED India Fellow in 2009. Before his time in the non-profit sector, he was an entrepreneur in the food industry for six years and graduated from the National Law School in 2002.
Ingrid Srinath is the Director of the Centre for Social Impact and Philanthropy at Ashoka University. She has been a passionate advocate for human rights, social justice and civil society for the past 19 years. A graduate of the Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata, Ingrid transitioned from her 12-year career in advertising to the non-profit sector in 1998 with CRY (Child Rights and You), where she was CEO from 2004-08. She served as Secretary General from 2008-12 at CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, an influential global network of non-profit organisations. She was Executive Director of CHILDLINE India Foundation, India’s emergency helpline for children in distress and, most recently, CEO of Hivos India, the Indian arm of the Dutch global NGO. She has served on the advisory boards of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Development Cooperation Forum (UN DCF), the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Young Lives project at Oxford University, Alliance magazine, Hasirudala, Danamojo and the Prajnya Trust and on the boards of WINGS, the INGO Accountability Charter, The Rules, Public Interest Registry and Majlis Law.
Krishna is the Founder and CEO at Sattva and is responsible for the overall strategic direction, growth and impact of the organisation. Over the last decade, Krishna has been working with the leadership of Global Foundations, Social Organisations and Corporates to design and scale their social impact initiatives, across India, SE Asia, Africa and Europe. Krishna leads many collective impact initiatives across different themes like water, education, livelihoods and is an active member of the CII National Committee on Sports.
Krishna started his career as an early member of Dell R&D in India and was the Founding Partner of Longhouse Consulting, a boutique executive search firm focused on technology and emerging sectors in India. Krishna is an alumnus of BITS, Pilani and INSEAD and serves on the Advisory Board of multiple social impact and technology start-ups.
M Hari Menon leads the India Office of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He also oversees the foundation’s work in South and South-East Asia. In his role as director of the India Office, Hari is in charge of managing the foundation’s work areas in India, with an objective to improve conditions of family health, sanitation, digital financial inclusion, agriculture, and gender equality. He leads these efforts to advance the country’s health and development goals by working closely with India’s central and state governments, local and global non-profits, community groups, researchers, and the private sector.
Hari has been associated with the foundation since 2006, with a brief role outside the foundation between 2011 and 2013. Prior to the India Country Director role, he was leading the teams that focus on policy and advocacy and program communications. Since 2017, he has also been overseeing the foundation’s policy and government relations for South and South-East Asia.
From 2011 to 2013, Hari served as strategic philanthropy adviser to Rohini Nilekani. He also has experience in the consumer goods and information technology sectors with companies like Colgate Palmolive and Infosys Technologies. Hari holds a graduate degree in business management from XLRI School of Management, Jamshedpur and a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the College of Engineering & Technology, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.
In 1999, Matthew established Magic Bus, which he has grown from a small group of volunteers conducting informal rugby sessions and one-off outdoor camps for disadvantaged children in Mumbai, into a multiple award-winning, large-scale NGO working to move millions of children and youth from highly marginalised communities out of poverty. The Magic Bus programme uses a 7 year format, taking an individual in at the age of 12 through a journey from childhood to livelihood. When Matthew created Magic Bus at the age of 29, he was the COO of Cox and Kings, India’s largest holiday tour operator. In 2001 he left his role at Cox and Kings and dedicated all his time to Magic Bus.
In 2006, Matthew also cofounded cleartrip.com, which he and his partnership team built into a US $1.2 billion per annum online travel business making it one of the largest online travel companies in South Asia and the Middle East. He has been elected an Ashoka Fellow, a TED Fellow and as an Asia Centre for Social Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy (ACSEP) Fellow. Matthew was recognised as India’s Top ED influencers by Scoo News in January ’18 and has also won the Business Standard Social Entrepreneur of the year in March 2018.
In 2007, Matthew was awarded an MBE for services to children to the Commonwealth. He has been awarded international rugby caps for India and playing in the World Cup Qualifiers in 2001. Matthew has also been an Olympic torch bearer at the London 2012 Olympic games.
Matthew is currently Executive Chairman of Magic Bus Global, leading operations in India, Singapore, US, UK, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Nepal.
He was on the Etihad Airways Advisory Board and currently sits on the Global Board of DASRA. Matthew is a UK Citizen and lives in Mumbai with his family.
Pritha is a Partner in Bridgespan’s Mumbai office. Pritha has been a Research Scholar at the Development Studies Institute at the London School of Economics. Prior to joining Bridgespan, Pritha established and led the New Delhi office of Dalberg Global Development Advisors, where she co-led the Global Health and Nutrition practice area. Previously, Pritha was a Director at Cambridge Economic Policy Associates (CEPA) UK, where she worked for almost a decade. She set up CEPA’s first international office in New Delhi and directed development mandates in Asia and Africa across public health, agriculture and infrastructure sectors. Pritha’s earlier responsibilities include being a financial specialist at the World Bank on urban infrastructure projects, and a Senior Consultant at Accenture in London and New Delhi. Pritha holds a Masters in Development Management from the London School of Economics and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore including an exchange program at Melbourne Business School. She is a recipient of the Citibank Leadership Award.
Priya Naik is the Founder and CEO of Samhita, a leading CSR consulting firm that designs innovative solutions and scales evidence-based approaches to maximize social impact. Samhita has worked with some of India’s foremost companies, foundations and social organizations to create impact across cause areas. It is a pioneer in driving collaboration in the CSR ecosystem, creating value propositions for stakeholders to collectively address critical areas such as sanitation and women’s empowerment. Priya’s journey in the social sector began as a Researcher at the Poverty Action Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, where she was part of two award-winning student startups. Her career is a fusion of on-ground grassroots solutions through enterprise and strategic consulting experience with established companies. She has a Master’s in Economics from Yale University, USA; a Master’s in Public Policy from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA; and a Master’s in Commerce from Mumbai University.
The transition from the corporate to the social sector early in her career. Having worked earlier with various corporate organisations, she joined CRY in 1994 to set up the organization’s Human Resources function. In 2002 she moved into more general management roles in CRY. Today, Puja is the Chief Executive Officer at CRY, India’s leading child rights organization.Puja believes that children should be at the heart of all human development work. Over the course of her work, Puja has been involved in the nurturing of a large number of organisations and people, enabling them to connect at the level of individual belief, to the vision of all rights, for all children. For the past 22 years, Puja has helped build an organizational framework for CRY that best captures the essence of justice and equity. Puja was recently announced as the 5th winner of the Olga Alexeeva Memorial Prize, for being a pioneer in the area of public philanthropy in India.
Safeena Husain is the Founder and Executive Director of Educate Girls – a non-profit organisation that aims at tackling issues at the root cause of gender inequality in India’s education system. After graduating from the London School of Economics, Safeena spent over a decade working with grassroots projects in Latin America, Africa & Asia. Educate Girls presently works in 21,000 government-run primary schools spread across 15 districts of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. There are over 4.9 million total beneficiaries of its programmatic interventions. Under Safeena’s leadership, Educate Girls has initiated the world’s first Development Impact Bond (DIB) in education. She has been conferred with 2017 NITI Aayog’s Women Transforming India Award and has in the past received the British Asian Trust’s Special Recognition Award from HRH Prince Charles for outstanding contribution in education.
Shaveta, Managing Director at Central Square Foundation (CSF), leads CSF’s efforts to improve capacity building and development of educators- teachers, principals and administrators. She also oversees CSF’s organisational development.She brings to the team more than a decade of professional experience in management and education. Her corporate background includes work at The Boston Consulting Group, Global Vantedge (a business process outsourcing start-up) and Citibank. She has also been a visiting faculty member in the Human Resources and Organisational Behavior disciplines at various business schools in Delhi NCR. Her primary areas of interest are teaching and research of organisational behaviour and leadership styles. Shaveta earned her bachelor’s degree in Economics from Shri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi and holds an MBA in Management from IIM, Bangalore. She is also certified in the psychometric tools MBTI, FIRO-B and FIRO-Business.
Shireen Vakil is a policy and advocacy specialist with over 20 years of experience in the field of Child Development with special interest in issues of adolescent girls. At Tata Trusts, Shireen heads the Policy and Advocacy unit where she is responsible for the strategy development, advocacy, policy and programming in the core areas of Education, Child Protection, Health and Nutrition, and Justice and Exclusion. Shireen works closely with governments and key stakeholders to ensure that policy is informed by research and practice.
Previously, she played a key role in setting up of Save the Children (India) and was responsible for developing the Advocacy, Campaigns and Communication function for the organisation.
Shireen holds a Master’s degree in Education and International Development from the Institute of Education (IOE), University College London (UCL).
Shridhar has over 23 years of work experience and has been associated with leading multinationals like Philips, ABB, Webex Communications (now CISCO), etc. Prior to joining Akshaya Patra, he was Vice President – Sales, Webex Communications. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering and a Master’s Degree in Management. Shridhar is an Eisenhower Fellow 2014 and is a graduate of the Advanced Management Program from Wharton Business School 2014. In Akshaya Patra, Shridhar oversees all the executive functions such as Resource Mobilization, Communication, Finance, HRD, IT and Operations Excellence Initiative. He brings to the table strong people management and organization skills.
Sundeep Talwar is the Chief Marketing Officer of The Akshaya Patra Foundation, the World’s largest school meal program run by an NGO feeding over 1.8 million children every day in 51 locations and 13 states in India.
Akshaya Patra has received ‘Gold Shield ‘ award for 6th time in a row from the prestigious Institute of Chartered Accountants ( ICAI ) of India for excellence in financial reporting. It’s in the hall of fame of ICAI. Harvard Business School has done a case study on Akshayapatra. MIT has featured it in its technology review. Akshaya Patra has been covered by Forbes Magazine, National Geographic, Discovery channel, CNN, BBC, etc. AkshayaPatra has also been certified as “ Great Place to Work by the GPW Institute of India in the category of Small & Mid sized organizations.
Sundeep is a dual Post Graduate in Management from Duke & IIM-Ahmedabad and certified Black-Belt in Quality with over 26 years of work experience in the areas of marketing & communications with leading corporates especially in Telecom Sector.
Before joining Akshaya Patra, as CMO, he was associated as National Business Head (Mobility Operations) with Aircel driving the Mobile Banking operations nationally. Prior to that, he has essayed Senior Leadership Roles with brands like Bharti Airtel, Motorola, Escotel (Idea) & Essar (Vodafone) across country and in Africa. He is also awarded with an international accreditation from BID Spain for developing the first anti-virus application He is a vivid professional Trainer too and have talked on various subjects in prestigious schools like IIM, IIPM, IMT over years
His search for ‘Existential Purpose’ in life made him quit a corporate career and join the Akshaya Patra Foundation, a not-for-profit organization with a vision that ‘No Child in India shall be deprived of Education because of Hunger’.
Akshaya Patra’s mission is to feed ‘5 million children daily by 2025 ‘. It has been rated as one of the top 100 NGOs in the world (ranking 23) by the Global Journal of Geneva and recently, in Feb’19 our Honorable Prime Minister, Narender Modi jee served the 3 Billionth meal.
Venkat is currently Vice President, Development at Ashoka University. His responsibilities include fundraising, providing leadership, developing and implementing strategy for the institution.
Venkat held central roles in top management tier in organisations of diverse profiles. His core strengths lie in building, growing and managing geographically diverse operations. With an entrepreneurial and start-up experience of 20 years, Venkat has built three companies from inception to significant growth and profitability.
Venkat is an alumnus of St. Xaviers College, Mumbai and has worked as Chief Operating Officer, Prop Equity| P.E. Analytics Pvt. Ltd. before joining Ashoka University.
Starting out working with street children in Mumbai in 1996, Deval's passion and commitment to serve marginalized communities led to the creation of Dasra over 2 decades ago. By working with NGO founders and leadership teams helping them dream big and providing them with strategic and operational support to create greater impact, he has played a critical role in the incubation or scaling of organizations including Magic Bus, Villgro, Sharanam Centre, Educate Girls and Aangan Trust. These grounded experiences allows him to share insights with newer philanthropists and established foundations leading to over INR 350 crores committed to NGOs and India's development sector. He firmly believes in collaborative action to achieve Dasra's goal of a transformed India where a billion thrive with dignity and equity.
“Every human being deserves a dignified life out of poverty, and it’s well in our collective means to achieve that goal"
Atul is the Founder & CEO of The/Nudge Foundation. After 17 years of starting, scaling and turning around various businesses in some of the largest and most respected organisations globally, he decided to start The/Nudge Foundation to fulfill his passion of working on inequality and social issues facing India. Atul is now serving both The/Nudge and GiveIndia as their CEO.
Atul was previously responsible for global sales, marketing, business-development and operations of InMobi, as its global Chief Business Officer. Over his 5-year stint at InMobi, Atul helped scale the organisation from a small start-up to a global leader in mobile advertising, with operations in 20+ countries. Atul also served on the Board of Mobile Marketing Association Prior to InMobi, Atul was the Head of Mobile Business for Japan & Asia-Pacific at Google. Atul has also done various general management, business development and sales roles across telecom and technology companies including Adobe, Samsung and Infosys.
Atul also served EndPoverty, another non-profit as Chairperson for two years, working on various poverty related issues including water, sanitation, education, skill-development, sustainability and women empowerment, and continues to serve as their Board Member.
Atul has been named in the #40underForty list by The Economic Times in 2017. Atul holds a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) from Indian School of Business and B-Tech from National Institute of Technology.
Ziaa has close to 25 years of work experience, of which 20 years were in the Corporate sector before she moved to the Development sector 5 years ago. She started her career with KPMG India, when the firm was just a year old in India, joining them for her articleship training in the Mumbai office. She worked for close to 10 years with KPMG across the Audit and Corporate Finance divisions, with a focus on Audit, Transaction Advisory & M&A Advisory for companies in the Financial Services and Oil sectors. She subsequently moved to the Corporate Banking groups of ICICI bank and then BNP Paribas India, overseeing & managing the credit requirements of mid-sized to large corporates based in Mumbai & Pune. She joined the HDFC Property Fund in 2006, to lead the Investor Relations team. This venture was the HDFC’s Group’s foray into real estate private equity, with a domestic & international fund of US$ 1.10 billion. She spent 6 years here, building and developing relationships with both domestic & international investors who were part of the real estate fund.
Ziaa transitioned to the development sector in 2014, when she joined to lead the H T Parekh Foundation, started to honour the rich legacy of HDFC Limited’s Founder, Mr H T Parekh. The Foundation is the CSR implementing entity for HDFC, and provides grants to exemplary partner organisations across rural & urban India in the areas of Education, Healthcare & Livelihoods.
Ziaa is a Chartered Accountant from the Institute of Chartered Accounts of India and a graduate from Sydenham College of Commerce & Economics, Mumbai.
Aditya Natraj is the founder and director of Kaivalya Education Foundation (KEF), a Piramal Initiative. KEF is change management organization that supports leadership development of State leaders, District leaders and School leaders to improve student learning outcomes. KEF works with 1300 school leaders, 450 district leaders and 1200 state leaders across 12 states to effect systemic change. It also runs the Gandhi Fellowship programme – a 2 year full-time programme to train young people in leading social change. Previously, Aditya was the Director of Pratham in Gujarat for 5 years, Vice-President of Business Development at ProXchange for 2 years and a Consultant at KPMG for 5 years. He is a qualified Chartered Accountant, a Masters in Economics and has an MBA from INSEAD. Aditya has been awarded various fellowship and awards, namely the Ashoka Fellowship, Echoing Green Fellowship, Aspen India Fellowship and the Times Now Amazing Indian award in the Education category.
Shyaam is the Chief Program Officer and the Head of Strategy at Teach For India. He is a seasoned organizational development professional with expertise in program design and rollout, operations transformation and capability building across sectors, education being the most recent. Over the past six years, Shyaam has managed operations, and led impact framework design and implementation at Teach For India. He also anchors key donor relations - especially with identified private sector organizations and with select international foundations. Shyaam is also an advisory Board member with Leadership For Equity - a delivery and Consulting organization that helps scale innovations in India’s public education systems.
