Governance

The Centre is governed by an Advisory Council that defines and anchors its vision and purpose. The Council also provides oversight to its strategic planning, budget approval and performance evaluation processes, including appointment and evaluation of the Centre Director.

Council members serve as ambassadors for the Centre contributing their skills, experience, knowledge and networks to serve its goals. They ensure that the Centre’s research, convening and leadership-focused activities are designed and executed to exacting standards of excellence. The Council meets quarterly and carries carries no fiduciary responsibilities; membership is pro bono.

Advisory Council

Ashish Dhawan

Founder and Chairman, Central Square Foundation and Founding Member,

Ashoka University

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 ChrysCapital to start CSF to pursue his goal of creating social impact via philanthropic investments in the school education space.

CSF is a venture philanthropy fund and policy think tank focused on improving school education and learning outcomes of children from low-income communities in India. CSF’s work involves supporting social entrepreneurs, building networks towards common education goals and developing insights for informing public policy. In specific, we support initiatives in the areas of school accountability and governance mechanisms, standardised assessments, school leadership and teacher development, high quality affordable schools and education technology for students and teachers. We also engage with the central government by providing critical thought partnership across key policy reform areas. With state governments, our engagement varies from providing strategic need based inputs to operational support in managing state reform agendas, thus creating system impact.

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. Its academic partners include the University of Pennsylvania, Carleton College, the University of Michigan, King’s College, London, University of California, Berkeley, and Sciences Po. The university opened its doors to 330 students in its first year and is located in NCR.

Ashish also serves on the board of several non-profits including Akanksha Foundation, 3.2.1 Education Foundation, Teach For India, Centre for Civil Society, Janaagraha, Bharti Foundation and India School Leadership Institute.

He is an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School and a dual bachelor (BS/BA) holder with Magna Cum Laude honours from Yale University. He is on the India Advisory Board of Harvard Business
School and a member of Yale’s Development Council.

Amit Chandra

Managing Director,

Bain Capital Mumbai

Mr. 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. At the firm, he had direct oversight of its Global Markets & Investment Banking business, which included the firm’s substantial principal investment businesses. 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 (India’s leading philanthropic exchange) and The Akanksha Foundation. He also a Member of the Advisory Boards of Bridgespan in India, the Centre for Social Impact & Philantrophy, and Swades Foundation.

Hari Menon

Senior Advisor,

Policy and Philanthropic Partnerships,

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Hari leads the foundation’s Philanthropic Partnerships work for the middle-east and the sub-continent, and also anchors the policy and government relations for the Gates Foundation’s engagement in South and South-east Asia. He was, prior to this, the Gates Foundation’s India Director for Policy and Poverty Alleviation. Before re-joining the Gates Foundation in October 2013,

Hari served as strategic philanthropy adviser to Rohini Nilekani, a leading Indian philanthropist in areas including water & sanitation, environment conservation, education and governance & accountability. Previously, he spent several years (2004-11) with the Gates Foundation’s India Country Office supporting a wide portfolio in public health in areas such as HIV prevention and maternal and child health. He also has prior experience in information technology with Infosys Technologies and in consumer marketing and sales with Colgate Palmolive and ESPN.

Hari holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi and a MBA in Marketing and Finance from XLRI, Jamshedpur. He can be reached at hari.menon@gatesfoundation.org

Amitabh Behar

Chief Executive Officer,

Oxfam India

Amitabh Behar is the Chief Executive Officer of Oxfam, India. Prior to this, he served as the Executive Director of the National Foundation for India (NFI). He is the Convener of National Social Watch Coalition and was the Co- chair of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP- 2010-2016) and for five years was the convener of the Wada Na Todo Abhiyaan (Don’t Break Your Promises Campaign) in India, Amitabh’s areas of interest are governance and civil society. Over the years he has worked on issues promoting governance accountability and social action.

He is one of the leading experts of people centred advocacy and was the Executive Director of the National Centre of Advocacy Studies (NCAS). He sits on several organizational boards including Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA), Navsarjan, Mobile crèche, CIVICUS (World Alliance for Citizen’s Participation and Global Fund for Community Foundation (GFCF) and he is the President of Yuva.

Vidya Shah

Chief Executive Officer,

EdelGive Foundation

As the founder of EdelGive Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Edelweiss Group, a leading financial services conglomerate with an asset base of $4.8 billion, Vidya Shah seeks to build a bridge between the users and providers of philanthropic capital by exporting the skills and strategies of the for-profit world to the social sector. Inspired by the notion that philanthropy is best served when organizations work collaboratively,

EdelGive puts a significant amount of focus on building a tight network of nonprofits, philanthropists, foundations, and corporations to scale impact and benefit many more people in need. “We have never viewed our effort through the narrow lens of a one-to-one relationship of funder and fundee,” she wrote in Edelgive’s 2015 annual report. “Rather, we have engaged quite doggedly in creating a community of people interested in learning and working together.”

Vidya graduated from the Bombay University, and received an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. She spent the first decade of her career with ICICI Bank, Peregrine, and NM Rothschild advising corporations on M&A transactions. She was one of Edelweiss Group’s early employees and later became its CFO.

Vidya began her philanthropic journey by writing checks, like many others. However, she soon found herself traveling and personally searching for nonprofit projects in education, livelihoods and women empowerment. In 2008, she founded EdelGive, as a way to bring more structure-and a more embedded approach–to Edelweiss’ philanthropic initiatives.