From Five Women
to Thousands

Udita Chadha is a social entrepreneur and gender equity champion, serving as the Co-Founder & CEO of UMEED, a non-profit she established in 2014 to holistically empower women. Under her leadership, UMEED has developed pioneering programs that blend skills, mindset, and exposure to create lasting impact. With a Master's in Social Entrepreneurship from the Marshall School of Business, USC, she brings a unique blend of business strategy, design thinking, and deep commitment to gender equity.

Her development journey began with the Teach For India Fellowship, which gave her firsthand exposure to the various levers of inequities and seeded her passion for systemic change. Later, as an Acumen Fellow, Udita further honed her leadership in tackling social challenges with entrepreneurial solutions.

Over more than a decade across corporate and development sectors, she has developed and led initiatives that translate ideas into sustainable change. At UMEED, she has led flagship programs like FirstLeap, a job readiness and empowerment program for marginalized women, and Sahyog, a pioneering collaboration with the Telangana Education Department embedding gender sensitivity into career readiness for over 80,000 students across 133 colleges.

Recognized as a pragmatic, go-getter leader, Udita continues to shape pathways of dignity and empowerment for women, while building inclusive ecosystems of sustainable social change.

Gauri Mahendra is the Co-Founder and President of UMEED, a social impact organization dedicated to advancing women's agency and economic empowerment. With over 15 years of interdisciplinary work experience across for-profit and non-profit organizations in India and the United Kingdom, Gauri excels at embedding corporate process discipline within the complex and often ambiguous landscape of social impact.

She holds a Master's in Human Resources and Knowledge Management from Lancaster University, UK, and is an alumna of the Teach For India Fellowship, a pivotal experience that shaped her perspective on the systemic gaps within the social sector. Her dedication to the development space led to her selection by the U.S. Department of State for the prestigious International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP).

Gauri translates this background into the creation of sustainable empowerment frameworks for women from underserved communities. She leverages sharp expertise in organizational development, culture building, and the cultivation of multi-stakeholder partnerships across government, corporate entities, and civil society, driven by a relentless focus on operational excellence.