Mahathi is passionate about poverty alleviation and livelihoods. She has worked in global philanthropy, microfinance, a nonprofit trust, and with the CSR wing of the Government of Telangana, India. She has written about microfinance borrowers and low-income students and conduct fieldwork for research projects, travelling through rural India. She has also headed communication and branding efforts for nonprofit and corporate organisations. She undertook the B Impact Assessment for Vaya Trust, which became the first Indian microfinance organization and only the fifth organization in India to become a B Corp (a certification for businesses that look beyond the bottomline to their impact on social and environmental stakeholders). She was recognized by the Telangana government in India as a 'Covid Warrior' for her Covid relief efforts as a part of the Telangana Surge Impact Group, one of the largest civil society organizational efforts in the country to mitigate the harms of the Covid waves, with more than 500 volunteers and alliances with 20+ organisations.

Mahathi has a B.A. in Economics with a minor in English from The University at Buffalo, SUNY. She was part of the founding cohort of the SILT (Social Impact Leadership Transformation) Bootcamp for young women leaders in the development sector. She has a diploma in Narrative Practices through Narrative Practices India, a collective exploring narrative ideas through the belief that ‘problems are rooted in oppressive structures rather than in communities, beings and people's bodies and identities,’ and that ‘communities and people are experts on their own lives.’ She believes in a grassroots approach - that people are experts on their own lives - and that it is important to view development issues through an intersectional lens. She loves the arts, literature and music and believes in their power to inspire social change and build community.

Why GHD?

GHD has an incredibly warm and supportive faculty. I chose GHD because of my conversation with the Director of the program, Professor Radelet, showed me how genuinely invested the department was in the wellbeing and success of the students in the program. The practitioner-focused curriculum and support in finding internships and practical experience was also one of the main draws for me, especially as an international student.

Summer Internship

Over the summer, I worked as a Strategic Communications Intern for Rising Academy Network, an education organization with a network of schools and government partnerships in West Africa. The main focus of my work was to revise and update an important organizational culture document called 'The Rising Way,' which contained their central ethical principles and stories of employees, students, and work culture that exemplified those principles. To do this, I interviewed students, teachers, school leaders and employees in Accra and Tamale in Ghana, in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and in Monrovia, Liberia. I also conducted workshops and surveys within the organization to understand how Rising employees understood and related to these principles in a practical way. The work was a great way to put what I had learned about qualitative methods into practice and to learn what it looked like to build a strong and inspiring (as well as ethical) organizational culture. It was educational to see what school leadership was up against with varying resources and across urban and semi-urban settings. I had the opportunity to work closely with the leadership and to see firsthand how their vision shaped organizational activity at the ground level.  Building strong culture also meant building camaraderie, and I was lucky enough to be a part of Rising's 10th anniversary celebration in Freetown, attended by Sierra Leone's Education Minister and the mayor of Freetown! My best friend, though, was the fruit vendor outside my apartment, who sliced up a delicious mango for me every day. I'm not sure if I miss the school visits or the mangoes more.