Sajjan Kumar Agarwal
Founder
Sajjan was born and brought up in Jaipur, Rajasthan and completed his higher education from BIT Ranchi and Michigan State University. Having grown up in India, Mr. Agarwal understands deeply the struggle that access to good quality education entails, as well as the transformative power such access holds. Out of this conviction, Sajjan founded Durgadevi Charitable Trust, now known as Foundation for Communities of Learning (FCL), in the year 2002 to work for the empowerment of children and women through education. He continues to support all its initiatives in various ways.
Over the past several decades, Mr. Agarwal has had an exciting career in founding and building several companies. He is currently the Chairman & CEO of GreenHawk Corporation, North Carolina.
Ashok Mittal
Trustee
Ashok serves as a mentor to second-generation entrepreneurs and as a management advisor to several family-owned businesses. He is also a certified facilitator for Personalysis (a personality assessment tool) where he provides employee assessment and coaching for the creation of high-performing teams.
Ashok is one of the founding members of South East Asian Leadership Academy (SEALA), which was voted the best leadership program in South and Southeast Asia by Forbes magazine.
He is also on the Board of Maadhyam Charitable Trust which works in the space of improving the quality of education for the underprivileged.
Venkatesan K G
Trustee
Venkatesan is a qualified Chartered Accountant. He has worked in senior positions in finance, and the commercial area of manufacturing and service industry for more than 30 years both in India and abroad. He has wide experience of working with family owned businesses.
Presently, he is engaged in mentoring and coaching of entrepreneurs and senior leadership team in small and medium size enterprises. He also advises high net worth individuals in managing personal finance, taxation and investments.
Chittaranjan Kaul
Trustee & Director
Chittaranjan is an educationist and a leadership expert. His experience, spanning more than 40 years as an international banker, teacher and school leader, chief executive for non-profit and for-profit organisations, leadership coach and management expert fuels his quest to create learning organisations, both at FCL and in large scale public systems. His expertise lies in fostering reflection and dialogue as a learning tool for organisations to achieve greater effectiveness, learning, responsiveness to change and team-building.
He is a part of various National and International Advisory Groups and Task Forces for ECD and Education. Chittaranjan holds a B.E from National institute of Technology, Srinagar and an MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad.
Harini Raval
Head Programs
Harini leads program strategy and operations at FCL in her role as Head of Programs. Harini's experience of nearly two decades lies in designing and implementing large scale interventions aimed at organizational learning and effectiveness in public health and education. Harini received a doctoral degree for her work with para-teachers using a design based research approach that integrates the use of systematic evidence to reflect on and strengthen the effectiveness of design interventions on an ongoing basis.
She is also trained as a trauma-informed mindfulness based therapist and offers a range of deep listening and therapeutic spaces. She is passionate about exploring how interventions for deepening personal well-being can yield professional effectiveness on a large scale.
Vaibhav Yadav
Program Manager
Vaibhav provides direction to Operations in Chhattisgarh & Bihar in the areas of Early Childhood Care Education and Development.
Since 2007 he has had extensive experience in working in tribal belts of the country, especially building a high quality ecce program in remote areas of Melghat. He has led a state-wide program for implementation of good quality ECCE in Anganwadis. Vaibhav is exceptional at helping state level administration develop an ownership for child development and nurturing care. Vaibhav holds an MSW from Shivaji University, Kolhapur.
Shikha Kundra
Program Manager
Shikha provides direction to Operations in Dadra Nagar Haveli, Daman & Diu in the area of Early Childhood Care Education and Development. Shikha began her journey in this area in 2012 spearheading a multi-department convergence capacity building program for more than 30000 village communicators for ECD.
Over the years she has led pilot and large-scale capacity building programs across the states of Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Goa, Uttarakhand and DNH & DD,closely working with government departments of Child Development, Education and Health. She cherishes the moments she spends in Anganwadis and classrooms connecting with little children.
She has received an MBA in marketing and human resources from SMU.
Rekha Menon
ECCE Specialist
Rekha provides technical leadership and spearheads learning and knowledge creation within ECCE. She has worked for children in the age group of 0 to 8 years for over twenty-five years in private schools and non-profit sector in centre-based,workplace-based and home-based programmes and in a range of childcarebackgrounds in India and abroad.
She has a Diploma in Early Childhood and Education from Mumbai University and a Post-graduate diploma in Educational Management from Symbiosis Centre for Distance Learning, Pune.
Manasi Chandavarkar
Program Manager - Research
Manasi leads the Research, Monitoring and Evaluation function at FCL. She leads a range of qualitative and quantitative research efforts at FCL, aimed at both evaluating our programs and generating rich scientific knowledge to inform the design of the programs.
As M&E lead, her core area of interest is not just in designing the process but also to enable people to draw deeper meaning and insight about their work through the data, and thus achieve greater strategic effectiveness as well as fulfilment in their work.
She holds a B.A. in Psychology from Pune University, and an MSc in Education from the University of Edinburgh, UK.
Anjali Frank Agarwal
Media Specialist
Anjali, as the team head for media at FCL takes care of video production and communication. She has been in the media space for 20 years, producing diverse content across media platforms as a writer, video producer, and teacher. She attempts to bring a lens to the stories in the social sector that represents the stories' protagonists from the marginalized sector with affection and respect.
She holds a Master’s in Economics from Panjab University and a Diploma in Film Producing from Ngee Ann Institute, Singapore.
Deepali Choudhari
Deputy Program Manager - Pune
Deepali leads the Teacher’s Excellence Program for middle school teachers in Maharashtra. Since 2015 she has led various programs such as the Scholarship Program and Science Centres at FCL, previously DDCT. Her experience also includes working in the domain of Human Resource Management.
Deepali holds a bachelor’s degree in Pharmacy and a Master’s in Personnel Management from Pune University.
Yogesh Chandrakar
Deputy Program Manager - Chhattisgarh
At FCL, along with Halim, Yogesh leads the Leadership for Nurturing Care Program in Chhattisgarh. Yogesh’s experience over the last 20 years has been in the areas of community engagement and mobilisation, youth development, early childhood education, government liaising and capacity building. Since 2015 he has worked closely with the ICDS in various districts of Chhattisgarh, training, monitoring and mentoring all levels of the system towards creating thriving Anganwadis.
He holds a Masters in Social Work and an MBA in Human Resource Management from Mahatma Gandhi Hindi Vishwa Vidyalay, Wardha. He has a strong interest in the Arts.
Halim Qureshi
Deputy Program Manager - Chhattisgarh
At FCL, along with Yogesh, Halim leads the Leadership for Nurturing Care Program in Chhattisgarh. Since 2002 his experience in the development sector has included coordinating and leading projects in diverse areas such as Women & Child health and nutrition, local self governance, livelihood, government liaising, Public Relations and community organisation in his home district of Bastar, Chhattisgarh.
Halim has completed his graduation and over the course of his work gained hands-on experience in program management, documentation, Research and advocacy. Since 2015 he has worked closely with the ICDS in various districts of Chhattisgarh, training, monitoring and mentoring all levels of the system towards creating thriving Anganwadis.
He has a special interest in writing in Hindi and has a way with words.
Nitish Jha
Deputy Program Manager - DNH&DD
At FCL, Nitish leads the Leadership for Learning with Meaning Program in DNH & DD. He has worked in the Education sector since 2012 as a facilitator, trainer, managing programs, conducting assessments, monitoring & evaluating, documenting and reporting, in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. In both states he has worked closely with multiple levels of the Department of Education and the ICDS, focusing on improving the quality of elementary education and Early Childhood Development.
He holds a Masters in Journalism and Mass Communication from Nalanda Open University. He has a keen interest in Math pedagogy and Theatre.
