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Meet our management team, global Board of Directors, India Board of Directors and Co-Founders.
Meet the Pollinate Group team
To meet all the members of our Pollinate Group team visit our company page on LinkedIn and look under the people menu.
Management team
Sujatha Ramani
CEO
Sujatha shares her leadership and passion for entrepreneurship and women empowerment to create traction, scale and value in social enterprise. With more than 28 years of corporate and entrepreneurial experience across sales, marketing, global program management and engineering, she has consistently grown revenues and created new employment. Sujatha has worked at multinationals as well as been a Director in the social sector in India. She holds an MBA and a Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Science.
Ravi Kumar
Senior Director of Growth
Ravi is an operations leader with more than 20 years of experience, including more than 11 years in the clean cookstove industry in India. At Pollinate Group Ravi leads a number of our teams. He is dedicated to creating an environment that is efficient, conducive to out of the box thinking and most of all maintains a strong focus on community impact.
Sita Adhikari
Director of Impact and Co-Founder
Sita is a Co-Founder of Pollinate Group and our Director of Impact. She holds a Masters Economics (Tribhuvan University) and a BA Commerce (Sahid Smriti College). While working as an entrepreneur Sita decided she wanted to extend opportunities to women around Nepal. Before joining Pollinate Group Sita was a founder and President of the Jhuwani Women’s Savings and Credit Cooperative, a founder of the Women’s and Children’s Section of the Jhuwani Community Library and the founder of Kalpavriksha.
Global Board of Directors
Scott Watkins
Chair
Scott is the Chief Marketing Officer for KISCO, a Korean chemical company, where he is responsible for new business development and sustainability initiatives. Scott is also a non-executive director and chair of parkrun Australia. Scott has a PhD in Chemistry from UNSW Sydney and spent four years in the UK working for two start-up companies in the area of Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLEDs). Scott then spent ten years working at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, where he was a Research Program Leader in Flexible Electronics. Scott managed both the science and commercialisation of technologies such as flexible solar cells.
Elena Bondareva
Director
Elena Bondareva (MA, BS) is an ardent advocate for eradicating persistent global problems through fusing systems thinking with social innovation and entrepreneurship.
Through research, advocacy and consulting globally, Elena brings tested expertise in catalysing and sustaining step change across organisations and whole industries. Elena uses her extensive experience, working with Boards and Executive teams of prominent Australian and international organisations, to redefine what is possible.
Anya Cherneff
Director and Co-Founder
Anya is the founder of Empower Generation, which merged to form Pollinate Group in 2018. In addition to working with Nepal for a decade, Anya has led programmatic areas including women’s economic and political leadership, energy access, addressing human trafficking and forced labour, as well as rural and youth development. Anya’s experience includes building diversity and inclusion within organizations. She currently manages corporate social responsibility at the American Auto Association (AAA) and holds a Masters of Human Rights (University of Denver) and BA in Anthropology (Columbia University).
Adrian Scott
Treasurer
Adrian is a retired Senior Executive, having spent almost 30 years at Accenture helping public and private organisations apply technology to improve their performance. Adrian led large scale project teams implementing solutions for major clients across a wide range of industries and has worked extensively in Asia, Europe and North America. He established and operates his family philanthropic foundation in honor of his father where he is focused on social impact investing, aligned with his deep and abiding interest in making a positive impact both locally and across the developing world in access to energy and finance, education and health.
Bill Scull
Director
After a 25-year Silicon Valley career as a marketing and strategy executive, Bill pivoted to focus upon mentoring and coaching entrepreneurs. He has mentored executive teams at over 20 African and Asian enterprises. Bill lived in West Africa for eight months mentoring companies at Stanford University’s Innovation Center and mentors Social Enterprises for Santa Clara University’s Miller Center. Bill also coaches teams at Stanford for two Design Thinking courses and mentors companies at Singularity University’s accelerator. Bill has an MBA from Stanford and a Masters in Engineering from MIT.
Marni Oaten
Director
Marni is an experienced energy industry executive with a demonstrated history of working delivering socially sustainable commercial and technical solutions. Over the past 10 years Marni has led global corporate sustainability and media relations functions at the global project services company, Worley. She also founded the Worley Foundation and led Worley’s energy and chemicals business across Australia and Papua New Guinea. Marni is also on the Board of the Global Institute of Intrapreneurs.
Marni has an honours degree in Electrical (Power) Engineering from Monash University and a Master of Business Administration from the Australian Graduate School of Management. She is also an Eisenhower Fellow, a Vincent Fairfax Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School Alumni and Centre for Ethical Leadership Alumni.
Manita Ray
Director
Manita Ray (MBA & B.Eng) is the Director and founder of Capital Human with over 22 years of experience across the private, public and NFP sectors. She has worked across South and South East Asia, Africa, the Pacific Islands and Australia. Currently, Manita is the SDG Finance and Gender Equality Expert for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the Gender and Inclusion Advisor to the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Gender Lens Investment Advisor to SHE Investments in Cambodia and a lead researcher. As ygap’s immediate past CEO she was a lead implementation partner for DFAT’s Frontier Incubators Program, and the lead designer of the ‘Gender Lens Incubation and Acceleration Toolkit’.
Kamala Srinivasan
Director
Kamala is a senior executive and coach with more than 20 years of experience in both nonprofit organizations and technology industries. She has been actively involved in community advocacy, civic leadership and championing issues impacting women in technology.
Kamala’s broad areas of expertise include global technology product delivery and operations, go-to-market strategy, digital transformation, and SAAS in Fintech, retail, legal, and media. She is a proud recipient of the prestigious “Digital Women Leadership Award” in 2018 for her contribution to women in STEM in India. She has experience working at organizations such as EMC, LBrands, and AnitaB.Org in both USA and India.
Subir Basak
Director
Subir is a 25 year veteran in the biotech and pharma industry and has operating experience in Fortune 500 companies in the US as well as mid-sized companies based in Asia. He grew up in India and has worked with nonprofits and foundations to help needy patients access life-saving medicines. He is currently working with the World Bank Group in their Health & Education Investment and Advisory group. He is a Charter Member of TIE and mentors young entrepreneurs. Subir has a Bachelors from IIT Roorkee (India), MBA from Kellogg at Northwestern University and a Masters and PhD in Engineering from Purdue University.
Board of Directors in India and Nepal
Our Nepal implementing partner Kalpavriksha is a private business owned by one of our Co-Founders Sita Adhikari, and does not require a Board of Directors.
Our India entity is a Pvt Ltd Company, a structure requiring a Board of Directors. See their profiles below.
Padmaja Alaganandan
Director
Padmaja is the Chief People Officer of PwC India. She has more than 25 years of consulting experience in business and human capital advisory across diverse industries. Before joining PwC in 2011, Padmaja worked in leadership roles in organisations including Mercer Consulting and A.F. Ferguson. She has been a member of CII’s National HR Committee, as well as on the Committee on Skill Development. Padmaja is a founding partner of Social Venture Partners Bangalore. She graduated from the University of Madras, and completed post-graduate studies at the Indian Institute of Management Kolkata.
Sashi Gumma
Director
Sashi is CBO at Elasticrun prior to this he was CEO of More Supermarkets, which operates in 12 states and more than 140 cities and towns. He specializes in food and grocery retail, leading large teams and people and business development. Starting as a Marketing Manager, Sashi has held roles including Regional Head and Operations Head at More Supermarkets, and COO at More Retail Limited. Sashi recently started a focused program for capability building in women associates in the stores to become store leaders. He holds a PGDM with a Specialization in Agriculture from the Indian Institute of Management and a B.Tech in Agricultural and Food Eng from the Indian Institute of Technology.