Ashraf Patel

Founder

Founder of Pravah · Co-founder of ComMutiny - The Youth Collective

Ashraf Patel is the founder of Pravah (1992)[1] and ComMutiny - The Youth Collective (2008)[2], Indian non-profits working on education and livelihood from New Delhi.

Ashraf Patel is an Indian social entrepreneur who co-founded Pravah in 1993 and later co-founded ComMutiny – The Youth Collective. Both organisations work on youth citizenship and leadership in India, and Patel is closely associated with the 5th Space framework, an approach to creating spaces in which young people can develop agency alongside family, education, work and leisure.

Early life and education

Patel took a BSc in physics at the University of Delhi and then studied personnel management and industrial relations at XLRI Jamshedpur.

Career

She began her career in human resource development in the corporate sector before moving to the social sector. In 1993 she co-founded Pravah, where she served as chief executive; the organisation developed curricula for schools and colleges intended to make urban Indian young people aware of social issues and to give them frameworks and opportunities for socially responsible leadership.

She subsequently co-founded ComMutiny – The Youth Collective, a network of youth-engaging organisations, and has worked on promoting young women social entrepreneurs within it. She is a member of the vartaLeap Coalition, which promotes youth leadership grounded in justice, equality, liberty and fraternity, and has served on the governing board of Oxfam India and taught at the Indian School of Development Management.

Patel is a co-author of Ocean in a Drop: Inside-out Youth Leadership, published by Sage in 2013.

Recognition

Patel is an Ashoka Fellow. She was named a Distinguished Alumna of XLRI in 2015 and received the Social Entrepreneur of the Year – India award, given by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship with the Jubilant Bhartia Foundation, in 2020. She was subsequently recognised by the World Economic Forum and the Schwab Foundation as a Social Innovator of the Year in 2022, and spoke on youth leadership at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos that year.[3][4][5][6][7]

Pravah

Pravah is a youth-development nonprofit operating across 15-plus Indian states that builds young people's leadership capacities to drive social change. Its programmes span adolescent life-skills development, youth civic engagement, early-stage social-entrepreneur support through its Changelooms programme, and capacity building for partner organisations, reporting reach to over 500,000 young people.

Pravah reports the following, on its own site:

PrayaSapna curriculum run across 1,860 NYKS teen clubs, impacting 35,000 adolescents across 5 states (with UNFPA)

ComMutiny - The Youth Collective

ComMutiny - The Youth Collective (CYC) was registered as a trust in 2008, formed jointly by Pravah and Sir Ratan Tata Trust to bring together development organisations and educational institutions working with young people. It functions as a community of practice for youth-work organisations across India, aiming to develop self-aware, proactive young citizens it calls 'Jagriks'. In 2019 it established the cross-sectoral vartaLeap coalition, partnering with development organisations, government bodies, media, corporations and UN agencies to mainstream youth-centric development.

ComMutiny - The Youth Collective reports the following, on its own site:

ComMutiny - The Youth Collective's ecosystem in 2024-25 comprised 2,240+ members and 154 partner organisations across 19 states, coordinated through vartaLeap