Vandita Morarka

Vandita is a 24 year old development policy consultant, legal researcher and gender rights facilitator. She has worked with philanthropists, government bodies, politicians, and celebrities towards building large scale development based action plans, several of which have been implemented in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, affecting over lakhs of people. She has directly trained 800+ young persons in social leadership and 25,000+ persons on issues related to gender sensitisation, access to justice, mental health, and the law, indirectly having reached over 2,00,000 persons. She is the Founder and CEO of One Future Collective , an organisation founded in December 2017, working towards developing compassionate youth social leadership, which has directly trained 2,500 persons to be social leaders in its first year itself, and has reached 20,000+ persons indirectly.

She is also a Local Pathways Fellow, with the United Nations Sustainable Solutions Development Network 2018-19, a Legal Researcher at Strategic Advocacy for Human Rights and at Red Elephant Foundation, while writing for various other digital platforms. She is currently also on the Board of Studies
for Political Science at Sophia College for Women (Autonomous), Mumbai, responsible for co-deciding how and what students learn in terms of politics and policy.

Vandita previously worked as the Policy, Legal and United Nations Liaison Officer, at Safecity (Red Dot Foundation), where she headed its policy and legal work, for India, during which time she was a member of the Policy and Strategy Group, World We Want 2030, UNDP, and the Working Group on Gender Equality and Youth, Interagency Network for Youth Development, UN Women. Her policy recommendations have been referred for acton by the Union Railway Ministry in India, and are being worked upon by the World Bank.

She holds an MA Hons. in Public Policy from the University of Mumbai, where she was a university topper, and an LL.B. from Government Law College, Mumbai. She has won several awards for her work in the development sector, most recently, the Annual Women Economic Forum’s ‘Young Leaders Creating a Better World for All’ award and the Barclays We Are The City ‘Rising Stars award for Social Impact’. She was featured as one of the women in the ‘Press for Progress: Top Hundred Trailblazers’ list for her advocacy to create an equal society. She has also been a jury member at the Orange Flower Awards 2018 and a speaker at multiple events, for example, those by TheaCare, Breakthrough TV, Google, SheThePeople etc.

She was given a full scholarship for attending the Equitas International Human Rights Training Program, 2018, in Canada, in recognition of her rights based policy-legal work and activism, and for the People, Power, and Change: executive education program in community organising, by Jindal Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Haiyya, in 2018. She has been invited to attend the CIVICUS AGM and parallel learning in Uruguay in December 2018, on scholarship.

Vandita has been otherwise engaged with organisations like Rann Neeti Strategic Consultants Pvt. Ltd., Centre for Study of Society and Secularism, Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, Human Rights Law Network, Maharashtra State Election Commission, United Nations Development Program, She The People TV –
Google, amongst others. Vandita is driven towards building sustained social change through everyday action and policy legal impact.