Digital Promise announced today that Chaula Gupta has been named the organization’s Vice President and Chief Program Officer. In this new role, effective May 2, Gupta will oversee Digital Promise’s national program team and an expanding international portfolio in partnership with leading international education and education technology organizations. Gupta will also support and lead the team responsible for Digital Promise’s award-winning and heavily utilized Learner Variability Platform and Navigator.
Additionally, Gupta will be responsible, through a team of highly accomplished leaders, for the development of a vast network of practitioners and learners who are anchors to the work of Digital Promise. These include the League of Innovative Schools, which includes more than 125 of the most forward-thinking district superintendents and school network leaders in the U.S.; the newly created League of Innovative Students; Digital Promise’s Edcamp Community of more than 60,000 teachers; and a teacher-coach community of nearly 1,000 members.
“We are at a critical moment in which bold solutions are required to make significant, positive transformations in U.S. and global education,” said Digital Promise President and CEO Jean-Claude Brizard. “Chaula brings more than two decades of valuable experience in public education and social innovation, and we are excited for her to help build our national and international presence to impact more educators and learners.”
Prior to joining Digital Promise, Gupta served as Vice President of the Chicago Public Education Fund (The Fund), where she drove the organization’s strategic programming and initiatives and directly oversaw its external engagement, operations, and talent management work. Under her leadership, The Fund scaled its programs from serving 20 principals to nearly 300 over five years and leveraged its investments to grow several educator-serving startup organizations. In this role, she co-chaired a citywide education funders group focused on principal quality and helped launch The Chicago Principal Partnership. Gupta ran successful campaigns to raise several million dollars in funding for programs supporting Chicago’s public schools.
“I am looking forward to taking the lessons I learned from supporting educators to drive innovation in Chicago’s schools and applying them to deliver on the promise of providing equitable access to learning opportunities for all,” said Gupta. “I am excited to join at this critical time in Digital Promise’s history as we embark on setting ambitious goals and designing bold solutions to achieve better educational outcomes for historically and systematically excluded students.”
Gupta began her career at Ashoka Innovators for the Public, where she helped select social entrepreneurs for Ashoka’s global fellowship. She also founded Teach For America’s Social Entrepreneurship & Innovation Initiative, which coached alumni entrepreneurs to push the boundaries for change through innovative solutions to education challenges. Gupta 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.
Gupta serves on the board of directors of GirlTrek, a national health movement serving over a million Black women, and on the board of directors of Chapin Hall, a nationally reputed pioneer in child and youth development research at the University of Chicago. 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.
