Ms. Navjot Kohli

Navjot comes from a diverse personal and academic background, with Masters in South Asian Studies and Social Development. She has 30 years of work experience in education and the non-profit sector. In education, she was engaged in teaching, course design, mentoring teachers/students and various management capacities in Turkey and Malaysia. In the non-profit sector, she was active in human rights, specifically child rights in the area of juvenile justice/stateless children, training lawyers and judges in Malaysia. Navjot has been with SMF since 2016 and has worked in various capacities within SMF, developing content, capacity building, managing MV for English medium schools and currently managing donor relations and documenting progress of programmes.

Dr. Leena Deshpande

Dr. Leena Deshpande has more than 35 years of experience in the field of education. She started her career in Indian Institute of Education. She had an opportunity to work closely with the veteran educationist Dr. Chitra Naik in the field of adult education. After joining S.N.D.T. Women’s university as a teacher educator in 1985, she contributed in a number of international workshops and conferences. She also has publication of books and research papers to her credit. She undertook a couple of educational research projects funded by UGC and World bank. Many students have completed their doctoral research under her supervision. She got an opportunity to serve as a dean of the faculty of education at her university and headed the department of education. She retired as the principal of the Institute of Advanced study in Education.(This was a special status given to the department of education by MHRD for its spectacular contribution in educational research and policies). She was appointed by NAAC, NCERT, NCTE in different capacities.  She has been working with Shantilal Muttha Foundation as a consultant for the last four years.

Ms. Meghana Desai

Meghana Desai comes with over 13 years of experience in the non-profit and the corporate sector. As a development sector professional, she has especially focused on school education. She is a Teach for India alumnus from their maiden cohort of 2009. Currently, she heads the Programme Monitoring & Evaluation at ShantilalMuttha Foundation, Pune. As a part of the core team in the organization, she is closely involved with programme strategy and conceptualization, curriculum development, research, evaluation, documentation and content writing for web media and print. Value-based education, civic engagement programmes for schools, school assessment and accreditation have been the key areas of her work. She has closely worked with the NCERT, New Delhi in recently developing the Common Minimum Program for Value Education in schools.

She is also a freelance content writer and a content developer. She thrives on creative pursuits and is an avid traveller, an amateur painter, a theatre enthusiast, a music buff and is also pursuing Kathak . By qualification, she holds a PG Diploma in Business Management (Finance and Mktg) and is an Electronics engineer from NIT Nagpur.