Track record

Two decades of moving
money to where it works.

Roles held and work led by our founder. Named below so you can verify them, rather than described in the abstract. Funders are not named here; we will discuss references in confidence.

ChildFund International

Asia head, partnerships, innovation & impact · 2024–

ChildFund India

Interim director, sustainability · 2025
National head, business development · 2017–19

CMCA

Head of strategy, advisory · 2022–

Technicolor India

CSR advisory · 2021–25

Secret Projects Global

Country director, India · 2019–22

Oxfam India

Regional head, South India · 2014–16

Habitat for Humanity India

Director, institutional partnerships · 2016–17
Regional head, South India · 2001–14

2001Joins Habitat for Humanity India as regional head, partnership development, for South India. Thirteen years on housing, water and sanitation across the south and flood relief in North Karnataka, creating corporate shared-value platforms and opening corporate partnerships across the region.
2014Regional head, partnership development, for South India at Oxfam India. Forms an advisory group of Bengaluru CEOs for Oxfam Trailwalker, devises its checkpoint sponsorships, and sets new fundraising records in individual giving, corporate grants and the Trailwalker event.
2016Returns to Habitat for Humanity India as director, institutional partnership development, and CSR advisor.
2016Leads Women Build for Habitat for Humanity: ten days in March putting women volunteers on site alongside the women whose houses they are helping to build.
2017The Women Lead Initiative for Clean Energy, developed at Habitat for Humanity India, is recognised across Asia by the Private Financing Advisory Network and USAID. It later becomes a funded programme of ₹46 crore.
2017National head, business development and engagement, at ChildFund India. Builds its fundraising structure and team, opens new funding streams, and conceptualises a European Union grant of about ₹8 crore.
2019Country director, India, for Secret Projects Global (formerly Secret Pillow Project India), a UK social enterprise exporting handmade products made by women’s enterprises. Sets up its Indian subsidiary, trains 500 women in entrepreneurship across five states, links them to government credit and incentive schemes, and raises share capital for the company.
2021Begins advising Technicolor India on its CSR programme, through to March 2025.
2022Head of strategy, advisory, at CMCA: institutional growth, grant strategy and resource mobilisation training for civic education.
2023Runs the TCS World 10K in Bengaluru to fund a village library under CMCA’s “My Library for Better Me”, run with the Government of Karnataka in panchayat libraries.
2024Asia head of partnerships, innovation and impact at ChildFund International, across India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Philippines.
2024Keynote at the National CSR Summit, NHRD Network Hosur Chapter, on the changing landscape of CSR and the synergy between CSR and ESG frameworks, speaking as CEO of CSR DIODE.
2025Interim director, sustainability and business development, at ChildFund India, from June to November.
2025Named contributor to a Business Fights Poverty Institute report on cross-sector collaboration, with ChildFund International.
2026Convenes “Catalysing Collective Impact for Youth Heat-Health Solutions in Asia” at the AVPN Global Conference, New Delhi, 25–27 August.

₹200 crore+

Raised for social programmes over two decades, across corporate, institutional and bilateral funding.

Career total, self-reported

500+

Corporate and institutional partnerships built, from first conversation to signed agreement.

Career total, self-reported

₹46 crore

Clean energy initiative for women, taken from concept to a funded programme.

PFAN · USAID recognised, 2017

4 countries

Partnership portfolios led across India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Philippines.

ChildFund International

₹45 crore+

Per country, in large-scale agroforestry and regeneration programmes in India and Sri Lanka.

Approx., converted from euro

500 women

Trained in entrepreneurship, skills and community-based business across five states of India.

Secret Projects Global

Speaking

Asked to set out where CSR is going.

Keynotes, panels and convened sessions at industry and development forums.

2026 AVPN Global Conference, New Delhi Convened “Catalysing Collective Impact for Youth Heat-Health Solutions in Asia”, with government and private-sector participants.
2024 National CSR Summit, NHRD Network Hosur Chapter Keynote: the changing landscape of CSR, and the synergy between CSR and ESG frameworks.
UN Women Forum, UN Listed speaker.

Speaker card for the National CSR Summit 2024: Ms Nirmala, CEO of CSR DIODE, speaking on the changing landscape of CSR and the synergy between CSR and ESG frameworks. — National CSR Summit, Hosur · 2024

Recognised

Women Lead Initiative
for Clean Energy.

A concept for putting clean energy into women’s households and enterprises, recognised in 2017 across Asia by the Private Financing Advisory Network and USAID. Nirmala developed it while directing institutional partnerships at Habitat for Humanity India.

It did not stop at a certificate. The initiative went on to become a funded programme of ₹46 crore. That is the test that matters: a concept good enough to win a room, and then good enough to raise against.

Habitat for Humanity

Women Build.

Habitat’s Women Build puts women volunteers on site alongside the women whose houses they are helping to build. It runs each year around International Women’s Day. This one ran over ten days in March 2016, under the line Looking back, forging ahead.

Nirmala spent thirteen years as regional head for South India at Habitat for Humanity India, working on housing, water and sanitation across the south and flood relief in North Karnataka, and returned in 2016 to direct its institutional partnerships. Housing is where she learned what a corporate partnership looks like when it reaches the ground: a family, a foundation, a set of keys.

A Women Build ceremony: women in Habitat for Humanity hard hats lay mortar on a symbolic brick foundation beneath a banner reading Looking back, forging ahead. — Women Build, Habitat for Humanity · 2016

Nirmala A at the finish of the TCS World 10K in Bengaluru, arm raised, race bib 22716. — TCS World 10K, Bengaluru · 2023

A fundraiser, not only an adviser

One library, a hundred children,
and a 10K.

She gave up running as a teenager. She took it up again in her forties to raise money, running the TCS World 10K in Bengaluru to fund a single village library.

The library sits under My Library for Better Me, a programme CMCA runs with the Government of Karnataka inside the state’s panchayat libraries. Children who use it meet active citizenship, gender equity, and financial and digital literacy, led by trained mentors. CMCA has taken citizenship and life-skills programmes into Indian schools for more than two decades, and has run Makkala Grama Sabhas since 2011: village assemblies where children question authorities about their own schools and villages.

One library. More than a hundred children. Books that stay in the village long after the campaign closes.

In a library CMCA had adopted in Ramanagaram, a girl shared an activity book she had worked through: a story about a caterpillar, about accepting herself as she is. She finished it by saying, “I like myself.”

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Two decades of movingmoney to where it works.