Lakshmi Hariharan
She heads SRUSHTI Degree College as the Principal. She laid the foundation of SRUSHTI back in 2001 as SRUSHTI Trust. Over the last two decades, she dedicated herself to enabling young people as Youth Social Innovators.
She holds a Post Graduation in Education from Azim Premji University & diverse background in classical arts, design thinking from D.school, Stanford University, USA, she has consistently applied her learnings to shaping the culture at SRUSHTI. At Azim Premji University, she undertook an Independent Research Study on “Individual and social change by adolescents, in the context of education, using arts and design processes” and developed a framework for “Designing open spaces to co-create,” as a part of her course. She has also completed the Women’s Entrepreneurship Program at IIM Bangalore, to hone herself further as an Entrepreneur in the Education space.
She enjoys inspiring youth to move from Idea to Action, through Co-Creation, a human-centered design process, using arts & design thinking methodology she got acquainted with at Stanford D. School.
Through long-term projects like Inclusive Education (SSA, GOK), Meena-Girl Child education (SSA, UNICEF), she has enabled youth to provide school access to out-of-school children, in more than 500 towns & villages across North Karnataka. Many of these programs have also been adopted at State and MHRD level, for which she has also conducted Masters-level Teachers training.
