Ruchika Bahl, India
Ruchika joined the Ashoka team as Director, Law For All Initiative, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka in November 2003. Before that she worked with diverse target groups in her areas of interest and expertise - Gender and Social Policy, Microfinance and Human Rights with emphasis on women and child rights and on programs for the disabled. In her 10 years of work experience she was part of varied organizations ranging from international groups like GTZ, World Bank and Interights to National civil society groups like Majlis, Concern India Foundation and Muskaan. Ruchika is an alumnus of the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. She also holds a degree in law from the University of Delhi, India. A British Chevening scholar, Ruchika loves to travel, meet new people, discover new cultures and indulge in adventure sports.

Siddharth Barthakur, India
Based in New Delhi, Siddharth Barthakur, became a social entrepreneur after working for 12 years in the corporate world as a marketing manager. In May 2005, Siddharth founded a cross-subsidized budget guesthouse called WELCOTT for low-income patients seeking medical treatment in Delhi. In this facility he is engaging volunteers to assist patients visiting Delhi for treatment in various hospitals. He offers a flexible monthly installment plan to patients so that they can afford high-cost medical treatment. Recognizing that tourism can be an attractive transformational agent for insurgency-ridden northeast India, Siddharth is working to put the region on the global tourism map. Siddharth enjoys traveling, meeting new people and learning about new cultures in addition to his hobbies of car racing and angling.

Sohini Bhattacharya, India
Sohini Bhattacharya is the Director of South Asia Partnerships for Ashoka in India. Sohini worked in the field of economic development and women for 10 years prior to joining Ashoka in 2000. She started out working with Child In Need Institute (CINI), a premier Mother and Child Health organization in India and helped in the launch of a new program within the organization working on income generation and micro-credit for rural women. She spent 4 years in Delhi working with craftsgroups all over the country and understanding their challenges to create a development focus within a national organisation working on marketing with indeigenous artisans and also consulted women’s groups on gender training and micro-credit. Sohini then worked with an Ashoka Fellow to set up a Gender Rights Centre in Kolcutta and coordinated the programs during the crucial first three years of launch. She joined Ashoka in March 2000 to help expand the Venture program in West India in which role, she brought together a diverse group of Fellows and strengthened the number of women in the fellowship. Later on, she ramped up the the venture program nationally, built systems and created awareness and resources for Ashoka in India. Sohini holds a post-graduate degree in English Literature from Jadavpur University, Calcutta and loves traveling, theatre and photography. She also sits on the board of CREA, an organization working on enhancing women’s leadership and focusing on sexuality, reproductive health, violence against women and social justice. She is based in New Delhi.

Sinee Chakthranont, Thailand
Sinee has been actively involved in the civic movement in Thailand since participating in the student protests for democratic reforms in the mid-1970s. She has extensive experience tackling complex social issues such as education, income-generation and women's and children's rights. She worked among Indo-Chinese refugees settled on Thailand's border with Burma. Sinee also has wide-ranging international experience, including two years as a student at Boston University. She has worked on social development issues from within international organizations including Save the Children and World Education. Sinee began her work for Ashoka as a part-time consultant in 1997. In 1998 Sinee took on the full-time role of Country Representative.

Chris Cusano, Thailand
Chris Cusano is the Director of Ashoka's Entrepreneur-to-Entrepreneur program (E2E) in Asia. He is building the Ashoka Support Network(ASN) to link business professionals to the social entrepreneurs of the Ashoka Fellowship, particularly in East and Southeast Asia. Chris joined Ashoka in 2000, after working for seven years with grassroots human rights organizations in Southeast Asia. Chris has specialized in the selection of new Fellows, increasing the volume of new elections we can handle, documenting Ashoka's unique selection criteria, and training staff in identifying and describing cases of social entrepreneurship worldwide. In 2004 Chris led Ashoka in applying its core expertise to a new staff recruitment program. Today, based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, Chris works with Ashoka's programs throughout Asia.

Tanya Jairaj, India 
Tanya has been running the Advocates for Social Entrepreneurship Program in Asia since November 2005. She has created a legal audit strategy for assessing the needs of the Ashoka Fellows and matching them with lawyers and law firms she has forged partnerships with. She has also built a network of law school partners for ASE. Tanya is currently further testing and spreading this approach in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in the Asia Diamond.  Tanya is a lawyer by training and has litigated with a leading Indian law firm for two years. Before joining Ashoka, she worked with several NGOs in India on issues such as child rights, good governance and education. She has also worked previously at the United Nations (Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs), New York, and, the National Human Rights Commission, New Delhi. Another hat Tanya has worn has been that of a grade school teacher.  Prior to joining the Ashoka team in India, she interned at the DC office. Tanya works from the Ashoka Mumbai office.

Kalpana Kaul, India
Kalpana is a development professional by training, having completed her Masters at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, in 1982. In 1980, she graduated with Psychology Honors from Delhi University. Kalpana combines field experience and activism with research and journalistic writing/editing. She began her career at TISS where she helped set up the Women's Studies Center. She went on to work with and conduct research on street children, which resulted in several publications, including a first-ever manual for house parents. In Bangalore, she was part of the core team that set up India's first magazine on education, targeted at educationists and parents. In The Hague, as Program Specialist she co-headed the Asia Desk of a major Dutch nonprofit, the Bernard van Leer Foundation. Her primary responsibility was program development in specific countries of the region and the identification of potential partners.

Mira Kusumarini, Indonesia
Mira's first sojourn into the social sector was in 1987 when she joined a youth exchange program between Indonesia and Canada. Her joy and happiness in working with people led her to be involved with this program for four years. She gained experience in international and community development, cross-cultural issues, and the art of facilitating. Managing different community development programs in the areas of water and sanitation, micro finance, and environmental conservation at CARE gave her an opportunity to receive a scholarship from the British Government in 1998 for a postgrade study in the UK. She studied social development planning and management at the University of Wales, Swansea. She then joined the World Bank research project on social capital and local institution. Two years before joining Ashoka, she worked for a USAID funded project on maternal and neonatal health and with Catholic Relief Services in a peace integrated development program.

Devashri Mukherjee, India
Devashri Mukherjee joined Ashoka’s 2001 and is a veteran of our Venture program, having found and brought in social entrepreneurs from remote areas in India such as Ladakh and Mizoram. Among other initiatives, she led the first systematic mapping of the Indian citizen sector so as to uncover new fields and entrepreneurs in the sector. Devashri brings to Ashoka over ten years' work experience in the Indian citizen sector, having been involved in exciting initiatives at an education resource center, a leading Indian funding agency, and one of the first education portals of India. Her interest lies in creating children's education material, and her children's stories have been published as resource materials. Devashri holds a Master's Degree in Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata and is based in Mumbai, India. In her spare time, she enjoys art museums and classical music.

Aditi Pany, India
Aditi Pany joins Ashoka’s Full Economic Citizenship team in India. After a childhood spent in the coastal Indian state of Orissa, Aditi headed to the arid desert of Rajasthan to get undergraduate degrees in engineering and economics from BITS Pilani. Here she broke new ground by becoming the first woman president of the students' union and helped found the Centre for Entrepreneurial Leadership. Aditi drove a rural entrepreneurship initiative which encouraged students to develop appropriate technology and income-generation projects for rural communities. Aditi interned for a year at the National Council of Applied Economic Research and then joined a CSO, TARAhaat – Development Alternatives. At TARAhaat, Aditi developed an ICT-enabled entrepreneurship training and support service and marketed it to prospective rural entrepreneurs in rural Uttar Pradesh. Aditi continues to mentor students involved with the entrepreneurship centre at BITS and has formed a Women's Council to enable networking among alumni.. For her community building endeavors, she was presented with the "30 under 30" award for all-round leadership by the BITS Pilani community given to achievers under the age of 30. Aditi's interests include handlooms and handicrafts, sea-swimming, painting and more recently photography.

Lily Paul, India
Lily Paul is the Director of the Ashoka Support Network (ASN) in India and manages the Ashoka-Deshpande Partnership project in the Indian state of Karnataka. In her last 3 years with Ashoka, Lily has led a successful marketing campaign to promote social entrepreneurship through David Bornstein's book "How to Change the World". Through establishing Chapters, she has built up Ashoka's citizen base in Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad, helping social entrepreneurs successfully collaborate with other sectors such as business and academia. Prior to Ashoka, Lily has had a diverse career ranging from being a banker, to mother, to stockbroker, to marriage counsellor. Lily was one of the founding members of Chrysalis - a training and counselling group that worked with adults and children to build life skills through workshops and counselling.

Shreen Saroor
Shreen is a Senior Change Manager in Colombo, Sri Lanka.  She studied accountancy, became a stock broker, went into marketing. Working for "one person's profit" became stale, however, so she jumped to the citizen sector within CIDA and their women's program.  Her moment to spread her wings occurred in 1999. Shreen gathered together 10 evicted Muslim women and they returned to Mannar. They wanted to recapture their identity and to go home. She started a multi-ethnic, multi-religious all-women's federation that works in a complementary approach between communities to develop products, market them and improve the financial status of women in society. Recently she set up a separate human rights organization that addresses war related violence against women.  For her work Shreen was awarded the Women Peacemaker Fellowship from the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice, San Diego. California in 2004 and became an Echoing Green Fellow in 2005. In May, Shreen will be in New York to accept International Rescue Committee's Women Commission's Voices of Courage award.

Dolon Sen, India
Dolon Sen joined Ashoka in 1998 and is now a Program Coordinator with Youth Venture. Prior to Ashoka, she taught in the primary section of a school meant for children from low income families. During her time with the Fellowship Program and now the Youth Initiative, she has worked closely with the team to help nurture collaborations and connections between Fellows and looks forward to doing interesting work with young people. She has a Masters in History from University of Delhi and works out of Ashoka's New Delhi office.

Sadhana Shrestha, Nepal
Sadhana's past professional experience spans the private, public, and non-profit sectors. She has managed people and budgets in the textile industry, conducted research for the National Planning Commission, and taught English at the secondary school level. Sadhana has served as a Board Member of TEWA (Nepali for "support") since its inception. TEWA, founded by Ashoka Fellow Rita Thapa, is a leader in philanthropy and especially local resource mobilization in Nepal. It helps create independent non-profit organizations and self-sufficiency for poor women throughout the country. Sadhana received her Senior Cambridge from Cambridge University, Bachelors of Arts from West Bengal University, and MA in Economics from Tribhuvan University. Sadhana has felt that Ashoka's success in identifying and investing in social entrepreneurs is unique and makes Ashoka a compelling organization in which she can contribute, learn, and make her own scratch in history. She especially looks forward to spreading the news of social entrepreneurship in Nepal and beyond.

Shivangini Tandon, India
Shivangini first came to Ashoka as an intern with the Global Development team in September 2006 and is joining the Fellowship team in India. Before joining Ashoka she received a B.A. from Boston University in Economics and Anthropology. Strongly interested in the issues of culture and identity, she turned to grassroots social change and conflict resolution to help her understand and resolve issues of issues of exclusion and marginalization in society. She attended a program on international conflict resolution and mediation in The Hague and did an urban study abroad with the International Honors Program, in New Zealand, China and India. While running around the globe, she helped redesign a youth empowerment project in New Zealand, keep the peace in her student group in India and thoroughly enjoyed the Chinese food and hospitality. Shivangini began her first social endeavor at age 8 in New Delhi, creating an “exclusive” social club that was open to all, to help dispel segregation in the playground. As a bit of an outcast in a somewhat racist low- income neighborhood in Glasgow, she continued the same, but with 5 year olds. She has had a nomadic life, having moved through fourteen schools, in rural and urban central India, Scotland, Delhi, Mumbai, the hills of Tamil Nadu, Boston and Washington DC. She is most content on a tree, but being a city girl now calls Mumbai her home.

Vipin Thekkekalathil, India
Vipin is building the Youth Venture program in Mumbai. During his college days Vipin worked on a variety of projects dealing with palliative care and children with challenges. He also co-founded an organization, which served as a platform for peaceful inter-religious dialogue between students from different faiths during the communal rights in 2002.  As part of his Masters of Social Work program, Vipin focused his thesis on child sexual abuse and through the process he began to see the larger society's indifference and denial of the issue and the total lack of support systems for abused children. He helped set up Tulir - Center for the Prevention & Healing of Child Sexual Abuse in Chennai, an organization which works on the prevention of child sexual abuse (CSA).  In 2005, Vipin and his team were selected for the Change Looms Awards, a national award given to young social entrepreneurs, which recognized their work on the prevention of CSA through “Personal Safety Education” in the schools of Chennai.

Tony La Viña, Philippines
Tony La Viña comes to Ashoka following seven years with the World Resources Institute (WRI), where he directed the Biological Resources Program. An environmental and human rights lawyer with a focus on governance, Tony led WRI's work on trade and agriculture, the impact of globalization on poor communities, genetic engineering and bio-safety, and environmental governance in Southeast Asia and China. Before joining WRI in 1998, Tony was an Environment Undersecretary of the Philippines, playing a critical role in getting the Philippines to recognize the land and ancestral domain rights of indigenous peoples and developing the concept of "social acceptability" as integral to environmental impact assessment. Tony was also Chief Negotiator for the Philippines in the implementation of the Conventions on Biological Diversity and Climate Change from 1996-1998 and was a key participant and spokesperson for developing countries in the negotiation of the Kyoto and Cartagena Protocols. Tony obtained his LLM and JSD from Yale Law School and his first degrees from universities in the Philippines. In 1988, straight from law school, he co-founded the Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center-Friends of the Earth Philippines, where he worked for seven years. In addition to his work with Ashoka, Tony serves as Dean of the Ateneo School of Government in the Philippines.