Suchitra L 2022

Suchitra Sarda

Communications Manager, Center for Systems Awareness, MIT

Founder, Compassionate Learning Communities (CLC), India | Compassionate Systems (CS) Master Practitioner, Center for Systems Awareness, MIT, USA | MA International Education Development, Teachers College, Columbia University, Post Graduate Business Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science


Suchitra Sarda has significant years of leadership experience in K-12, higher education, education consultancy, and teacher coaching. She has a master’s in International Education Development from Teachers College, Columbia University and a post graduate diploma in Business Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is also a certified master practitioner for Compassionate Systems Framework. Suchitra recently founded Compassionate Learning Communities (CLC) that supports the development and growth of Compassionate Systems in schools and school systems.

At Teachers College, she engaged in exploring and understanding compassion, social emotional learning (SEL), mindfulness and systems thinking in schools, development work, refugee context, and international institutions. Her master’s project in the Compassionate Systems Framework elucidated this exploration where she studied participant’s (representing 7 hubs around the world) understanding of the Compassionate Systems Framework after their Introductory workshop. She looked at the experience of new and experienced users of the framework and shared insights for future research.

Strategy and planning have been central to her work. As the trustee of a K-12 school in India, she implemented the strategic change from the state curriculum of a low-income private school to the International Baccalaureate (IB) and International General Certificate Examination (IGCSE) so that they could focus on inquiry learning. She was actively involved in operationalizing the instructional and administrative changes. She has also founded, managed and taught in an English Language Institute.

Suchitra’s experience at the Center for Public Research and Leadership (CPRL), Columbia Law School, prepared her to offer research and consultancy support to clients in the educational sector while deepening her own understanding of education in the United States. As a teaching assistant at CPRL for a year, she supported her team in consultancy projects that gave her opportunities for design, strategic planning, and implementation support in areas of law, governance, and policy in school systems and allied public- and social-sector organizations in the United States

She spent the summer of 2019 working with the International Rescue Committee as their Lead SEL teacher for grades K-12 at the Refugee Youth Summer Academy. She was also a Research Fellow at the Lemann Foundation, Brazil. She moved back to India in fall of 2019 and was consulting SEE Learning, India partners on development of an Implementation tool kit for the Social Emotional and Ethical Learning curriculum. She joined PTC Consultancy in July 2020 as it gave her the platform to launch the Compassionate Systems Courses in India. To broaden her reach and be able to work with people who truly have Compassionate Systems as a goal Suchitra founded Compassionate Learning Communities in January 2021.

ssarda@systemsawareness.org