Sushma Bisht Mathur

Founder & President @Navchetna Society

After serving in the Indian Army for 5 years, I have a cumulative of 10 years of experience in the social sector domain.Only when one stares directly into the plight of the Indian rural community, can one comprehend the magnitude of the task at hand. With a vision to empower women and children in the villages of Uttarakhand, I founded and presided over Navchetna, an 80G and 12A certified not-for-profit organization based out of Pithoragarh, India. Navchetna started off as a voluntary disaster-relief taskforce during the Uttarakhand floods disaster in 2012 and has grown from strength the strength since. Navchetna aims to empower women & children from low-income rural communities by strengthening education, health, and employment opportunities available to them. Over the years, we have run several initiatives in these domains, including but not limited to, personality development for school children, career counseling sessions, sewing classes for rural women, computer literacy classes, etc. As the President of Navchetna, I have been actively involved in all the stages of an impact project. Right from conceptualization to execution, and also checking for evaluation metrics to assess the real impact of each of our initiatives. At Navchetna, our focus has been in the formulation of innovative low-cost, need-focussed programs that generate considerable impact. Over the years, I\'ve developed crucial insights in project designing, need-gap analysis, funds sourcing, and impact assessment analysis. Through our initiatives, Navchetna has positively impacted 16 villages, 1,500 children through educational drives, and over villagers through health programs. The NGO is currently operational across 3 states - Uttarakhand, Delhi, and Punjab. For our efforts and dedication towards the empowerment of women and children in rural India, I was felicitated by Mr. Pranab Mukherjee, the President of India and the Ministry of Women and Child Development in January 2016.