Governing Board

President

Ph.D. (Entrepreneurial Studies), MA (Economics), PG Diploma in Journalism & Communication, MA (Economics) Affiliated Network for Social Accountability (ANSA), Institute of Governance Studies, BRAC University, Bangladesh.

Treasurer

Founder and CEO, Swasti, Bangalore.

Secretary

COO, Labournet, Bangalore

 Member

Solomon Jayaprakash is the Country head of Ashoka in India since March 2010. Before moving on to Ashoka, Solomon founded MAYA, a Karnataka-based development organisation in 1989 focused on eradication of child labour, working with communities across slums and low-income areas of Bangalore Urban & Rural districts. In MAYA he worked with public school reforms and early child care using citizen action to change the quality of schools in two states in India and still scaling to reach thousands of schools. He also setup two for-profit enterprises, one is Maya Organic, which works with artisans to develop and market high quality products around the world and another company LabourNet that has a network of urban informal sector workers together using Internet and communications technology to track workers and help them find jobs.

Member

Srilatha Batliwala is a Research Fellow of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University, where her research focuses on transnational grassroots movements. She is a practitioner researcher with over twenty five years experience in a range of social change and gender justice activities that spanned grassroots organizing, advocacy, and research in India. She serves on the board of three international NGOs: 1) WEDO (Women’s Environment and Development Organization),2) PLAN International,3) ISTR (International Society for Third Sector Research).Srilatha was Program Officer for Civil Society at the Ford Foundation, New York, before joining the Hauser Center in 2001 and is currently based in Bangalore, India.

Member

Geetha is the Founder-Director of the Srishti School of Art Design and Technology and its sister institution, the Mallya Aditi International School. She has dedicated her life to finding and establishing new models of educational institutions that are creative, synergistic and original in their approach to learning. An administrator, researcher, teacher and facilitator, she has pioneered many courses and projects that examine a wide variety of needs, social and educational. Geetha is the author and principal investigator of Project Vision, an international research initiative that is looking at the development of appropriate instructional strategies and technology-related tools that foster creative cognitive architectures in young children from urban poor communities.

Member

Fellow, Madras Institute for Development Studies, Chennai

Member

Senior Fellow, Institute for Human Development, New Delhi

Member

Dhanwanti Nayak is an independent writer and consultant based in Bangalore. After securing a first class Bachelor's Degree in economics from St Xavier's College, Bombay, she went to Purdue University, USA, to study anthropology and philosophy. She has done cross-disciplinary theoretical work for institutions such as National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, Management Development Institute, Gurgaon, Harvard and Boston Universities, USA, among others. She has also written extensively for the horizontal portal, indya.com as well as the weekly magazine, Outlook Traveller. After a recent stint with Azim Premji Foundation, she has shifted her focus to elementary education where her interest is in the pedagogy of arts. She is working currently with NGOs to develop arts pedagogy for school children.