ILSS Emerging Women’s Leadership Program (EWLP)

Jyotsna Siddharth
Country Director, Gender at Work

Prachi Windlass
Senior Director, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation

Ramya Ranganathan
Coach, Facilitator, Adjunct Faculty - IIM Bangalore

Saumya Sindhwani
Assistant Professor of Organizational Behaviour (Practice), Indian School of Business

Sujata Khandekar
Founding Director and Secretary, Board of Trustees – CORO India

Urvashi Butalia
Feminist Writer, Publisher, Activist

Vasanthi Srinivasan
Professor, IIM - Bangalore

Venil Ali
Senior Director - Program Operations & Scale, Antarang Foundation

Yamini Atmavilas
President (Head Strategy & Research), Circle In

Ameen Haque

Founder, Storywallahs

Story coach, Innovation consultant and Diversity champion, Ameen Haque is the founder of Storywallahs, a company that helps leaders and organisations leverage the power of stories. Storytelling is an essential skill, no matter what you do and Ameen helps you build that capability at your organisation. His approach to Innovation is focused on Culture, specifically fostering a culture of innovation. And as a diversity champion, he helps organisations build a culture of inclusiveness in the truest sense of that word. A Graduate Degree in Business Administration, Ameen has studied Advertising Media Planning at MICA. Formerly a Vice President at Ogilvy & Mather, Ameen has over 20 years of experience in advertising, theatre & consulting. These stints have exposed him to stories, human behavior, team dynamics and strategy. He loves climbing hills and playing table tennis.

Gayatri Das Sharma

Co-Founder, Timshel

Gayatri’s professional experience over the last twenty-four years has been in the area of talent and leadership development. In her capacity as a consultant, coach and facilitator she has had the opportunity to live and work in India, China and the USA.
Gayatri has worked on several organizational and people change initiatives, which required her to influence and drive change both at a systemic and people level. Some of the key projects that she has led are a change management initiative with a large India conglomerate, this involved culture change, organization restructuring, HR system design and deployment and leadership assessment and development. She has played a key role in the design and implementation (across ten thousand employees) of an IT enabled performance and management system for one of India’s largest public-sector engineering companies.

Jyotsna Siddharth

Country Director, Gender at Work

Jyotsna (She/They) is a Country Director at Gender at Work India. In the past ten years, they have worked with several non- profits, UN agencies on gender, gender budgeting, inclusion, water and sanitation (WASH). Jyotsna’s work spreads across arts, theatre within caste- gender, feminist and queer spaces where they actively advise various social art collectives as well. Jyotsna has Masters in Development Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Social Anthropology from School of Oriental and African Studies, London and a recipient of British High Commission’s Chevening Scholarship, United Kingdom (2014-15)

Prachi Windlass

Senior Director, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation

Prachi is a director at Michael & Susan Dell Foundation India LLP. In her role, she manages foundation’s grants, investments, and large-scale government partnerships. Prachi is passionate about data-driven education and blended finance.

Before joining the foundation, Prachi worked at Boston Consulting Group in Gurgaon, India. She has also worked extensively in the telecommunications sector at Qualcomm and Motorola in US. Prachi is an alumni of Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, University of Southern California, Los Angeles and University of Chicago.

Rakhi Singh

Co-Founder, Timshel

Rakhi is an experienced HR consultant with over 19 years of experience. She has extensively worked in the areas of organizational transformation and change, Leadership Development and Performance Management.

She has worked on several people and change initiatives both at the systemic level and individual level. She has also designed and delivered several leadership development journeys for clients across sectors.

In the last few years Rakhi has gained deep expertise of working in the social sector. Her work in the sector includes Performance Management System design, Vision and Value Articulation and Deployment, 360 Degree Assessment, Designing Learning and Development Journeys and Competency Design and Assessment.

Ramya Ranganathan

Coach, Facilitator, Adjunct Faculty - IIM Bangalore

Poet, Parent, Professor, Philosopher – Dr Ramya stands for inner sovereignty and outer excellence. She practices and teaches an inside-out approach that empowers leaders and changemakers to lead with joy, resilience and powerful intention.

Dr. Ramya holds a B.Tech in Electronics from IIT Madras, a PGDM from IIM Ahmedabad and a PhD from London Business School. She has been recognized by the MHRD (Govt of India) in the top 15 innovators in higher education in India, has received an Academy of Management best paper award, has delivered 3 TED talks, and is on the advisory board of Samatvam, Centre for Mindfulness at IIM Bodhgaya.

She has worked in blue chip companies like ICICI, Infosys and Citibank, and it was her own experiences in the corporate world that shaped her quest to learn how she could help people (and herself) flourish better at work. Post her PhD in Organizational Behaviour, she taught as a full-time faculty at IIM Bangalore for a decade, during which time she further researched and developed a systematic approach to catalyze joyful excellence in individuals and organizations.

A globally certified life and leadership coach, Dr Ramya has conducted workshops and coaching for more than 50 organizations and has multiple courses online on edX, IIMBx and Swayam platforms. She is certified in Coaching with Depth Methodology (by IIT Madras and PeopleFirst Consulting), Life and Leadership Coaching (by Coach for Life Institute, USA and Back to Source, India), Pranic Psychotherapy (by World Pranic Healing Foundation), Reiki, Access Consciousness, and Yogic approach to holistic development (by SVYASA University).

A maverick academic, Dr Ramya now combines her research, corporate, teaching, and coaching experience with a mix of mind-body personal mastery tools (learnt and honed over a period of 20 years), to craft potent journeys of transformation. She uses a combination of left-brained logic, right-brained reflection, heart-based presence and energy-based activations to help her students shift mindsets, unpack limiting beliefs and open gateways to new possibilities.

She has published a book of poems titled, “I’m Choosing Life”, speaks on a bi-monthly video column with Mint, runs a Youtube Channel, is part of a farming collective, and created a platform www.craftingourlives.com to share her work with the world.

Ruha Shadab

Founder, LedBy Foundation

Ruha Shadab is a doctor turned public health professional turned social entrepreneur. She is the Founder of LedBy Foundation, a unique leadership incubator that works on improving equity in the workplace. She is a recent graduate from Harvard University, where she received her Master in Public Policy on a full tuition scholarship. On graduation, she was awarded the Harvard Kennedy School Women’s Leadership Award: the first Indian to receive it. During her Master’s, she served as the Co-Chair of the India Conference at Harvard, worked at Yale University as first author for a medical ethics paper, and at the Gates Foundation on a global health strategy framework.

Saumya Sindhwani

Assistant Professor of Organizational Behaviour (Practice), Indian School of Business

Saumya Sindhwani is an Assistant Professor (Practice) in the Strategy & OB group. Her research interests are at the intersection of strategy, leadership and society. She actively looks into the challenges faced by organisations while designing and implementing strategy, given the highly volatile, uncertain and complex business environment we live in today. She also has keen interest in the role of women as economic change agents, including their leadership styles. She has published two books, one on leadership and the other on the role of creativity in business. Prior to entering academia she has spent many years as a consultant with Aon Hewitt and also worked with British Broadcasting Corporation. She regularly publishes in applied journals and presents at various academic conferences and corporate events. She is an award winning teacher. She is also a poet, her poems have been published in various anthologies.

Sujata Khandekar

Founding Director and Secretary, Board of Trustees – CORO India

Dr Sujata Khandekar is the Founding Director of CORO. She was formerly an assistant engineer in Maharastra State Electricity Board, Mumbai, when she was deputed for adult literacy related work initiative by the government of Maharashtra and CORO. She received an MA in Gender, Education & International Development from the University of London, and was a fellow in the Leadership Development Program of MacArthur Foundation (India).

Recently, Sujata has been awarded a PhD for the thesis on ‘Meanings of Women’s Empowerment’. This academic research is facilitated by Sujata with seven grassroots co-researchers, by developing the research methodology ‘Feminist Cooperative Inquiry’, feminist research influenced by the Cooperative Inquiry (CI) approach. Sujata has authored a book in Marathi titled ‘Aashevin Aasha’ (Hope without Hope) based on her community related work. She has represented CORO in national and international forums, and has contributed to many publications.

Swati Gahlaut

Co-Founder, Timshel

With over twenty four years of experience Swati has done significant work in areas of Strategic HR Advisory, Leadership Assessment, Talent Development and Coaching. Swati has a deep appreciation of the linkage between people and business. Swati has worked extensively in areas of designing business aligned HR solutions including designing HR strategy, Corporate Academy, Performance Management Systems, HR processes, Competency Frameworks, Talent Development Interventions. She is a skilled facilitator who has worked with leadership teams across organisations.
She has facilitated many workshops with CXO level, Senior and Middle management in the organizations in areas on Managing self, Managing people, Interviewing and Feedback skills and Team Leadership. She has worked across industries like Manufacturing, FMCG, FMCD, BFSI, IT products and services, government and PSUs, Telecom and consulting Services.

Urvashi Butalia

Feminist Writer, Publisher, Activist

Urvashi Butalia is an independent publisher and writer. Co-founder of India’s first feminist publishing house, Kali for Women, she now heads Zubaan, an imprint of Kali. She has had a long involvement in the women’s movement in India, and writes for newspapers, journals and books at home and abroad on a range of issues to do with women and gender. Among her best-known publications is the award-winning oral history of Partition: The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (winner of the Oral History Book Association award 2001 and the Nikkei Asia Award for Culture 2003). She is also visiting faculty at Ashoka University Sonepat. Butalia has received many awards for her work, among them the Padma Shri, which she was awarded in 2011.

Vasanthi Srinivasan

Professor, IIM - Bangalore

Venil Ali

Senior Director - Program Operations & Scale, Antarang Foundation

Venil Ali has been working in the Development sector informally since 2004. She started her journey through the Social Involvement Program (SIP) at St. Xaviers College, Mumbai, while pursuing her Bachelors in Life Sciences and Biochemistry. She volunteered at an after school program with V – Care Foundation for three years. While pursuing her Masters in Biochemistry from Sion Hospital, Mumbai, she started her own after school centre called LEAP (Lets Educate All People) catering to ~60 students at Matunga Labour Camp, Mumbai. This ran for two years and was featured in newspapers like Mumbai Mirror and DNA. In 2009, Venil joined the first cohort of the Teach For India Fellowship. She taught for two years in low income private schools and municipal schools in Mumbai. Post her Fellowship, she joined Teach For India as a staff member. She worked as a Program Manager, Senior Program Manager and then was the City Director of Mumbai for six years. As City Director, she would oversee different verticals like Fellow support and development, student learning and outcomes, fundraising, alumni engagement, government and school relations, HR and admin.