As Managing Trustee of SIFF, Kavita drives the strategy and path of all our programs. Deeply passionate about bridging the gap of inequity, she aspires to create unique and well deserving opportunities in the field of education and arts. She is also the Co-founder and Managing Director of Young Artiste, an online platform for Music and Arts Education. Prior to this, she was also the co-founder and CEO of Minglebox.com, a start-up in the online education space in India and has worked with Wipro Technologies, ICICI Bank and the Tata Administrative Service where she was an early member of the founding team of Tanishq. Kavita is an alumnus of IIT Delhi and IIM Ahmedabad. She is an avid Hindustani vocalist and brings this into different aspects of life at SIFF.

As Co-founder and Trustee of SIFF, Sandeep guides the vision for our work in Education and the Arts. Sandeep Singhal is Co-Founder and Managing Director of WestBridge Capital. Prior to WestBridge, he was Co-Founder and Managing Director at Sequoia Capital India. Sandeep has invested and served on the boards of over 20 public and private companies. Sandeep is a Trustee of the India Foundation for the Arts. Sandeep is also a founder of the IIT Delhi Endowment and the IIM Ahmedabad Endowment respectively. He also serves as a trustee on the board of Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment. Sandeep holds an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, an MS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Illinois, where he was awarded the Abraham Lincoln Fellowship, and a B. Tech. in Chemical Engineering from IIT Delhi.

Shilpa has a heartfelt love for languages and teaching. She was able to combine the two interests by being a language teacher. Having an innate passion for teaching, Shilpa immediately got into the field when she got a chance at the Teach for India fellowship in 2016. She continued teaching for two years in a government school in Chennai. Before this, Shilpa worked for five years in the corporate space at Accenture and LinkedIn. An avid reader, her love for literature is quite evident from the way she talks about various literary topics. She is enthusiastic about learning new languages and is in continuous pursuit to find out innovative methods to do this. She has a degree in Biotechnology from Kristu Jayanti College and has done an MBA from Sikkim Manipal University.

Avinash Monappa can be rightly called a jack of all trades. From being an avid reader, and an enthusiastic sportsperson, he has the best knowledge about everything. He teaches Science, Mathematics and Computer Science at SIFF. He is a believer of breaking down big concepts or information into its simplest form. Before this, he was a Teach for India fellow at Bangalore and taught children in a government school. He is also a qualified Electronics and Communications engineer and has worked as a software engineer at NDS Pay TV Technology and Cisco Systems. He is an alumnus of PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore.

After completing her post-graduation in the humanities from Fergusson College, Pune, Rachana decided to pursue a career in education. In a career spanning over 4 years and 7 states, Rachana has worked in a wide variety of roles. While she has developed curriculum and trained teachers for Early Childhood Education, her interest also took her to explore the sciences when she implemented a STEM curriculum with Creya Learning. Also a proponent of international collaboration, Rachana believes that cross-cultural interaction is an effective means of helping students break their social boundaries. Intrigued by the choices and influences that underline the process of human social evolution, she decided to take up teaching Social Science and continues to do so at SIF Foundation. Rachana’s classroom is a delight wherein she combines her diverse experiences ranging from inquiry based learning to clowning. She often relates the position of a 21st century teacher to a clown who can intelligently model a problem-solving behaviour in the classroom for learners.

Apart from being one of the first alumni of NIT Puducherry, Gaurav has maintained a meritorious record throughout his academic journey. Being introspective and critical, he has always questioned the process of education and felt deeply motivated towards teaching. His pursuit of deepening his understanding of how 21st-century mindsets can be built in school students brought him to Teach for India (TFI), where he worked as a fellow from 2017-19. There he established school level leadership structures for young students by enabling them to find their voice through theatre and debate clubs. Gaurav has been hosting integrated learning experiences through Mathematics at SIFF and brings the joy of learning Maths in his classroom. Along with being a lucid maths teacher, he is a yoga enthusiast who brings with him a dialectic lens that highly contributes to the team.