About Ishan

Ishan has spent the last 15 years in Chicago, where he’s been rooted as a community organizer and entrepreneur. He’s focused his organizing around improving public safety, and creating a public infrastructure for mental health care access with a non-police crisis response for mental health crises. Previously, he built and scaled a tech-enabled business that created over 250 jobs in Chicago across technology, operations, and hospitality. He’s dedicated to building bridges between people and policy, and has brought that to life through creating a Progressive IPO (Independent Political Organization) in the 32nd Ward of Chicago, The People’s 32nd.

Ishan is a graduate of Northwestern University with a degree in Music and Business. After graduating from Northwestern, Ishan was a business analyst at McKinsey & Company where he primarily worked on Agricultural Development, Food Security, and Business Model Innovation work. From there, he went on to co-found and build an organization that has won an Inc. 5000 Award, Chicago Top Places to Work, Fifty on Fire, and many others. He has been deeply engaged in community organizing work around improving public safety, developing universal access to mental health care, helping secure that legislation through a public referendum process as well as in the 2024 city budget, and building community leaders here in the 32nd ward.

Ishan works with movement organizations and those fighting for liberation through combining his learnings of distributed organizing with corporate strategy. In practice, this means working with orgs on:

Fundraising Strategy & Implementation

Strategic Planning (1, 3, 5 year planning)

Organizational (Infrastructure) Scaling Strategy & Systems

Data as an Asset

Operating Principles & Goals Planning

Hiring Strategy & Implementation