#19 Savinay Chandrasekhar

NON-PROFIT & EDUCATION

Work: President at Minds Matter of Denver; Founder at Focusedesign
Education: BS, University of Pennsylvania; MBA, Thunderbird School of Global Management; MEd (Educational Leadership), The Broad Center for the Management of School Systems
Hometown: Denver, CO
Current Hinge City: Denver
Influence: 179 friends on Hinge

Your most embarrassing date moment?
I’m pretty selective in whom I ask out, so I’m happy to say I haven’t had many embarrassing dates beyond being a SoCal boy woefully unprepared for the weather (wearing a puffy in 80-degree sunshine or a t-shirt in 35-degree freezing rain). I say that knowing full well there’s a chance that I’m someone else’s embarrassing date. But I guess I’ll never know... until they see me on this list. ;)

What career accomplishment are you most proud of?
I love my job, but over the course of the past 10 months, I’ve learned about the difficulties of running a 100%-volunteer run organization of over 160 folks across our Board, Leadership Team, and Mentor group. Not to mention the innate obstacles in the lives of the 52 students we support. None of these issues prepared me for what I have considered one of the most difficult crises our team has ever had to overcome — within a span of two months in February & March, over 10% of our students dropped out of the program, with even more on the edge.  Our team banded together and held a marathon diagnostic session to figure out what was really happening, and developed teams to target those root causes. At the end of it all, the volunteers and students felt more engaged in the organization, the end-of-year feedback was exceptional, and we’re on a path to even greater improvement next year. It was an intense challenge, but one that I’m happy to say we’ve grown stronger from.

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