Earth Focus

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Our Founders

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Vipul Gupta
Founder and CEO
Vipul Gupta is the Executive Director of Earth Focus, building on over 40 years of experience in the Central Indian landscape. Prior to Earth Focus, Vipul spent three decades building teams and organisations in the corporate sector, in the realm of manufacturing and distribution. His last venture, Excel Controlinkage, has over 800 employees and exports to 70 countries. He is as comfortable working with tribal communities as he is in board rooms. In parallel, Vipul’s philanthropic journey spans over two decades on girl child education across the country, with a focus on central India. Bringing his business expertise to a new life in the non-profit sector, Vipul works to solve development challenges through a community-driven approach that creates resilient, long-lasting solutions. Through extensive engagement with local communities, civil society organisations, government agencies, and local businesses in Central India, he realised the need to connect the gaps between funding, data and research, and local practitioners - which led to the birth of Earth Focus Foundation’s bottom-up, in-depth approach. Outside of Earth Focus, he also mentors small businesses and individuals on management and strategy. He plays a strategic advisor role at Nature in Focus, a portal on nature, wildlife and conservation. A passionate and awarded nature photographer, Vipul also dabbles in spatial design and process design. Vipul has a BE degree in Mechanical Engineering from Manipal University.
Aaran Patel
Founder
Aaran Patel guides Earth Focus Foundation’s strategy and development, and was instrumental in building the organisation’s education program. He was drawn to Kanha because of his deep belief in how the landscape abounds with possibilities for restoration — of the relationship between forest dwelling communities and the ecosystem, of nature-based livelihoods, and of the degraded land outside the protected area. Alongside his work with local communities in the Sal forests of Central India, Aaran works on climate finance, policy and technology as Director, Climate at The Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation, which has been involved in climate change mitigation for 30 years. He is also an advisor to Godrej & Boyce, a diversified Indian conglomerate that owns and manages an urban mangrove forest in Mumbai. Aaran is a Master in Public Policy graduate from the Harvard Kennedy School where his research and work focused on climate, social and urban policy. In parallel to his coursework, he received a fellowship to write on climate and urban issues for Scroll.in, a leading Indian digital publication, and was research assistant to Rahul Mehrotra, an architect and professor of urban planning at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. While at graduate school, Aaran worked as a consultant for organisations including the India Climate Collaborative, which works to mobilise grant capital towards climate solutions in the country, and Indus Action, which he advised on how to add a climate lens to social protection delivery. Before graduate school, Aaran was part of Teach for India's 2015 fellowship cohort and subsequently worked in the organisation’s innovation cell building a platform of collective action for two years. Aaran received his BA from Pomona College where he double majored in history and politics.

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