Chaula Gupta

As Vice President and Chief Program Officer, Chaula oversees Digital Promise’s national program team and an expanding international portfolio in partnership with leading international education and education technology organizations. She also supports and leads the team responsible for Digital Promise’s award-winning and heavily utilized Learner Variability Platform and Navigator.

Most recently, Chaula served as Vice President of The Chicago Public Education Fund, where she helped drive the organization’s strategic programming and initiatives and directly oversees its external engagement, operations, and talent management work. Under her leadership, The Fund scaled its programs from serving twenty principals to nearly 300 over five years. In this role, she co-chaired a citywide education funders group focused on principal quality and helped launch The Chicago Principal Partnership. Chaula also launched the organization’s first endowment fund and ran successful campaigns to raise several million in funding for programs supporting Chicago’s public schools.

Chaula brings two decades of experience in public education and social innovation. She began her career at Ashoka Innovators for the Public, where she helped select social entrepreneurs for Ashoka’s global fellowship. Most recently she founded Teach For America’s Social Entrepreneurship & Innovation Initiative, which coached alumni entrepreneurs to push the boundaries for changing countries through innovative solutions to education challenges. Chaula built partnerships with incubators and seed investors across the country and helped alumni entrepreneurs raise more than $10 million collectively to launch new education ventures. Under her leadership, Teach For America launched an annual Social Innovation Award with a focus on early-stage entrepreneurs of color and created a virtual design-thinking training program.

Chaula serves on the board of GirlTrek, a national health movement serving over a million Black women; on the board of Chapin Hall, a nationally reputed pioneer in child and youth development research at the University of Chicago; and on the national board of Distinctive Schools. She was selected to the 2020 class of the Leadership Greater Chicago Fellowship and to the 2017 class of Allstate Foundation’s Greater Good Fellowship for nonprofit leaders. Chaula speaks on social innovation, runs design-thinking workshops, and has served as a selector for Ashoka and Echoing Green fellowships. She graduated from Mumbai University with a bachelor’s degree in telecommunications engineering and received a master’s degree in international relations from Syracuse University.