Nilisha Mohapatra is on a mission to revolutionize how us humans learn. As a facilitator and learning designer, she creates programs that invest in unlocking people’s imagination through experiential learning. For the last decade, she has worked with young people, teachers, nonprofit staff, startup founders, as well as teams of Fortune 500 companies, to develop key 21st Century skills of creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication. Her practice of facilitation bridges the worlds of depth and play, while her program designs gear towards rewiring routine ways of thinking and being. 


She set out on this journey in 2009, when she was interning within a foster care home at one of the prisons in India. Nilisha quickly learned that the children there weren’t in need of life advice. What they were needing, was to know how to build trust, safe friendships, to understand what they were feeling and articulate it, and to also know what their real choices in life were, so they could exercise it. That led her to deep diving into life skills education. Today, she is based in Bangalore (India) and continues this journey with the Capacity Building Team of Quest Alliance – a nonprofit enabling self-learning in young people and educators. Nilisha is also the Lead Trainer in India for Partners For Youth Empowerment – an organization sparking the creative potential of youth across the world.