Anushka Sharma is the co-founder of SOAR through Leadership, one of two social impact initiatives supported by the inaugural Lead Forward Fellowship Grant. As Anushka illustrates in her portfolio, the purpose of this initiative is to provide leadership and character development to local youth in the Greater Lafayette area. In its first year, SOAR far exceeded any reasonable expectations, and much of that had to do with the incredible social impact leadership enacted by Anushka in the 2023-2024 academic year. 

 

Anushka’s greatest strengths come in the form of organizational leadership and clear communication. Anushka is a highly analytic thinker, and this lends itself to a robust capacity for organization, both in terms of organizing collective efforts towards shared goals and in terms of organizing information in her communication. As a leader, she excels at running teams and at breaking down larger challenges into more manageable tasks. She ensured that SOAR had a legible, effective organizational structure that provided new members with a clear sense of their roles and how they would contribute to the success of SOAR. This, in turn, led to a strong sense of cohesion within the team and a high degree of efficiency in achieving early goals.   

 

Building on the above, Anushka’s communication skills are equally vital to her success as a social impact leader. She is deliberate and precise in how she approaches her communication efforts, with an awareness of audience and a strong drive to ensure understanding. She checks in regularly with others, maintaining open lines of communication and to ensuring everyone stays on the same page. Initially, Anushka’s strengths with communication tended toward task coordination at the start of her journey in the Lead Forward program, but over time she has become equally deliberate in using communication strategies to foster connection, cohesion, and emotional investment in shared goals.  

 

Perhaps what has impressed me most about Anushka’s leadership, and what has ensured her success, is her outstanding capacity for continuous learning. Anushka has been consistently excellent at recognizing difficult situations, analyzing the challenges, finding ways to improve, and moving the organization forward. Whether they be logistical or interpersonal challenges, both of which are inevitable when trying to make a real impact in the world, Anushka has successfully used her resilience, social awareness, and problem-solving skills to overcome these obstacles in ways that satisfy all parties involved. 

 

The last area of growth I want to note here is Anushka’s capacity for collaboration. By coupling her systems thinking skill with a greater commitment to the perspectives of others, she has shown an impressive ability to work with peers but also with community partners and university faculty and staff. The result, ultimately, is an exciting new social impact initiative with a great deal of collective commitment and momentum.