Meenakshi Gupta

Meenakshi Gupta is the co-founder of Goonj, the Delhi-based organisation that treats urban surplus material, above all discarded clothing, as a development resource rather than as charity. Before entering the voluntary sector she had a corporate career of more than fifteen years, including eight years at the BBC. She is a commerce graduate with an advanced degree in communication.

She and Anshu Gupta began Goonj in 1999 on the argument that cloth, though a basic human need, was absent from India's development agenda. Within the organisation her work has been on the parts that are hardest to see from outside: communication, research, the internal and external conversations that set strategy, and the building of the wider ecosystem the model depends on. She has been closely involved in translating Goonj's stated values into working practice and in introducing new ideas into the organisation, and has led several of its firsts, including a framework for reflective learning and staff wellbeing and a ground-up strategic visioning process. Over two decades she has been central to organisation-building as Goonj grew from a Delhi initiative into a national operation.

Outside Goonj she is a founding member of Catalyst 2030, a global network of social entrepreneurs, and has sat on the juries of several awards, among them the Government of India's Nari Shakti Puraskar. She is a trained dance movement facilitator, and has taken a particular interest in the wellbeing of people doing last-mile work in the development sector.[2][3][4]