About

Shashi Velath is a changemaking and social impact strategist. He is currently Executive Trustee of Bridge Institute. He enables businesses, governments and NGOs to build long-term partnerships to advance Sustainable Development Goals. At the heart of his career has been strategizing systemic changemaking, which involves building trust, understanding needs, presenting solutions and delivering results. 
Much of his learnings about changemaking, leadership, strategy, social innovation and persuasive negotiations have been learnt across Asia’s conflict zones as a war journalist. He distilled his learnings from the battle-field to craft winning strategies for the companies he worked. Some of the media companies he worked for are The Week, World Report, Tehelka, Christian Science Monitor, Third Eye TV, CNN IBN/CNN News18 and NewsX. 
He attributes his successful leadership of social sector organisations to his approach of winning the hearts and minds of all his stakeholders and customers. As the head of Ashoka’s 'Framework Change' Strategy in Asia he nurtured, mentored and developed the leadership capacity and abilities of some of the leading social entrepreneurs and their teams. He was part of a select global leadership team at Ashoka, which developed a ‘radical collaboration’ model – Framework Change – to rapidly scale up social innovation in a world constantly defined by change. Shashi has utilised BRIDGE methodologies in numerous programmes across India with corporates and governments.  
He is an avid trekker and curates ethnographic trekking trips in India to help raise funds for building social infrastructure for local communities living in remote regions.