Lakshmi Chilukuri < VALIDATED >

And she has a secret weapon: her 70-year-old mother, who volunteers as the fellowship’s “chief encouragement officer,” calling each new cohort on their first day to say in Telugu, “Nuvvu cheyagalavu” — You can do it. Chilukuri is currently scaling Sankalp across three countries, but she refuses to call it expansion. “That sounds like extraction,” she says. “We’re deepening. We’re asking: what does a support system look like that lasts 20 years, not 20 months?”

“If the people you’re helping aren’t in the room when budgets are cut,” she says flatly, “you’re not helping. You’re performing.” lakshmi chilukuri

The results have been startling: 94% of Sankalp Fellows break the cycle of intergenerational poverty within five years. But Chilukuri is prouder of the less quantifiable outcome: “They don’t leave their identities at the door. They become the people who can write a grant proposal and explain it to their grandmother in her mother tongue.” In a philanthropic world often driven by tax-efficient check-writing, Chilukuri is an irritant. She has publicly criticized “tarmac philanthropy”—wealthy donors who fly into a village, take a photo, and leave. She advocates for term-limited funding (forcing organizations to become sustainable) and insists on board seats for the very communities being served. And she has a secret weapon: her 70-year-old

“That’s when I realized,” she told me over Zoom, her bookshelf lined with both Python manuals and Telugu poetry, “inequality isn’t a resource problem. It’s a network problem.” What sets Chilukuri apart from typical philanthropists or activists is her insistence on measurable dignity . She rejects both the savior complex of charity and the cold efficiency of pure metrics. “We’re deepening

That bluntness has cost her partnerships. It has also earned her fierce loyalty from grassroots leaders who feel seen for the first time. Off the record, people who work with Chilukuri describe the same paradox: she is both intensely driven and unfailingly gentle. She begins every meeting with a two-minute check-in on “what’s heavy” before any agenda. She is known to handwrite notes to young staffers who lose a family member or face a visa crisis.

Her flagship initiative, the , doesn’t just fund students—it embeds them into professional ecosystems for three years. Fellows work on real projects (from climate data analysis to public health campaigns), earn a living wage, and are expected to return one skill to their home community.