Anu Prasad, Founder, and CEO, India Leaders for Social Sector ILSS
Anu is the founder and CEO of India leaders for social sector ILSS. She is a founding member of Ashoka University. She is the earlier founding Deputy Dean of the Young India Fellowship.
Podcast
Overview
[00:34] About Anu Prasad, Founder and CEO, India Leaders for Social Sector ILSS
Anu is the founder and CEO of India leaders for social sector ILSS. She is a founding member of Ashoka University. She is the earlier founding Deputy Dean of the Young India Fellowship. Not only that, but she has worked earlier for American Express and TNT.
[00:56] Career Transitions
I’ve had, six career transitions from the corporate to where I am today, including a stint being a stay-at-home mom which was also a career in itself. Careers are no longer ladders, they’re like jungle gyms you sort of find your way in this world.
[03:52] About India Leaders for Social Sector ILSS
India Leaders for Social Sector (ILSS) is a learning and development organization that aims to build capacity and leadership talent in the Indian social sector.
The growing complexity of problems faced by India on the development front underlines the need for organizations to devise innovative, sustainable, efficient, and scalable solutions; it has also renewed the focus on the importance of building leadership and capacity to oversee the implementation of these solutions and to plan for future challenges.
All of us need to be actively engaged citizens in India’s development story. It is not an issue for one person to solve. We all need to be a part of the solution, in terms of we’ve made great strides since independence. But we still in the human development indicators we are still at 130 out of 180 countries, so there are ways to go.
[05:53] What are some current challenges of leadership and talent that we face in our country?
In this last decade, two things have happened. One is CSR and all the ultra-high net. The whole billionaire giving, so a lot of private philanthropy has started coming into the sector. But the sector also needs to have that absorption capacity, there are apparently 3 million NGOs.
So they’re all small, scattered, even 100 Crore-sized NGO would be in two hands. So there is a challenge because if you have to create impact at scale, you do need leadership.
Profile
Anu Prasad is the Founder & CEO of India Leaders for Social Sector (ILSS), a Delhi-based non-profit that works to strengthen the leadership talent pool in the social sector. Prior to setting up ILSS in 2017, Anu was the founding Deputy Dean of the prestigious Young India Fellowship (YIF) and a founding member of Ashoka University, India’s first liberal arts university.
Before joining the social sector, Anu held leadership roles at multinational companies such as American Express and TNT. At Amex, she led the implementation of Amex’s global financial re-engineering as a part of launching the Amex Financial Resource Centre in India. At TNT she was head of finance for the company’s North India region. An entrepreneur at heart, Anu has also co-founded and managed a successful travel company.
She has also been a consultant for Dell Foundation on its education projects. Anu is an avid reader, an active volunteer in civic causes, and a passionate believer in lifelong learning, all of which she incorporates into the ILSS proposition of learning and values-based leadership.
