Neesha Modi
Neesha Modi facilitating a session with community partners and grantees. Photo courtesy of The Kresge Foundation
Neesha Modi, who earned a dual MBA and Master’s of Science in 2012, is the director of programs and social investment operations at the Kresge Foundation, a Detroit-based philanthropic organization dedicated to promoting human progress.
Through her guidance as the connective tissue between the foundation’s operations and the mission, Modi forwards Kresge’s goals of building and strengthening pathways to opportunity for low-income people in America’s cities, and seeking to dismantle structural and systemic barriers to equality and justice. We connected with her via video link to learn about her impact journey and learnings along the way.
What happened right after you got your joint degree?
I was at Deloitte for 3 years, and I was lucky to try a variety of projects in my first year that led me to eventually focus on working in the healthcare space on culture and talent. I felt a deep connection to that, and I felt that I was actually starting to understand what impact-focused work was like even through a consulting lens. However, I eventually decided, as many people do, that the consulting lifestyle and all the rest of it was just more than my life could handle at that time, and I decided to leave. I was excited to move into Detroit after grad school, but being on the road with Deloitte really didn’t allow me to be a part of the community in the way that I was hoping and aspiring to do. At the 3-year-mark, I transitioned over to the Kresge Foundation, and, like I mentioned to you, was really lucky and honored to be a part of our Detroit team, which allowed me to be squarely focused on the community in which I was living.
Read more of the interview at Business+Impact
