Deepa leads a team in partnership with the Managing Director of Discovery, Exploration, and Programs that designs and builds how the Foundation identifies and enters new grantmaking areas that align with its mission and considers how to activate the Foundation’s resources and adapt its practices and collaborative approaches based on the unmet needs and opportunities in each potential area.
For the last five years, Deepa has served as an independent strategy consultant, organizational development strategist and advisor, coach, and facilitator to nonprofits, government agencies, and philanthropies through her firm Blue Lotus Advisors. Her practice has focused on working alongside people seeking to sharpen their approach and impact—both what they do and how to activate the strategic and operational spaces between people, sectors, groups, and cultures in ways that are rooted in care and intentionally designed to accelerate social and economic equity and justice.
Recent sector experience includes conservation; climate and environmental policy advocacy in North America; food justice and urban agriculture among Black, Brown, and Indigenous residents in Chicago; and economic justice for women and families through cash assistance and basic income programs. From 2020 - 2022, Deepa served as a founding director of the Community Food Navigator, a food justice initiative that fosters a network of mutual care among Black, Brown, and Indigenous growers and food producers in the Chicago food shed. Early in her career, Deepa served as a program officer at MacArthur, leading the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions, International Connections Fund, and Arts & Culture, including the design and launch of the Arts & Culture Loan Fund for arts organizations with the Program-Related Investments team.
Deepa earned degrees in biology and public policy at the University of Chicago with a focus on health access and quality of care; business administration at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management with a focus on decision sciences and marketing; and public policy and administration at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government with a focus on public health, human rights, and economic development.
