Dhara Shah - Senior Associate
Dhara Shah is a facilitator, social designer, and community builder with over a decade of experience in supporting people and organizations deepen equitable community engagement strategies. Her portfolio includes providing coaching, organization-wide training, and group process facilitation with non-profits, local governance structures, and organizations working towards social change.
She has held roles such as Learning & Education Manager at Creative Reaction Lab leading social design initiatives at top design institutions and organizations nation-wide, and also is a founding member of JustDesign Co-op where she co-designed operations to provide anti-oppressive engineering and design services to grassroots organizations.
Dhara holds a MFA in Design for Social Innovation from School of Visual arts as well as a BS in Biomedical Engineering with a minor in Biology from Illinois Institute of Technology. She also has a certification in Community Based Participatory Action Research (CBPAR) from Tufts University (2022) and in Product Design and Development at Northwestern University (2014) Her graduate thesis was recognized by the School of Visual Arts for developing a customized participatory budgeting process for a Business Improvement District in Queens, which elevated the voices of immigrant-owned small businesses in community revitalization efforts.