Palak Dudani, Author at AIF

In 2020, AIF quickly pivoted to address the critical situation in India and the United States. In India, AIF leveraged its programs’ infrastructure on health, education, and livelihoods via its wide network to address the needs of the nation with ventilators, PPE, and other interventions in order to save the lives of vulnerable Indians from COVID-19. Read the report here.

In 2021, India recorded the world’s highest daily tally of 314,835 COVID-19 infections on April 22nd, as this second wave sent many more into a fragile health care system, critically short of hospital beds and oxygen. Working with our partners, hospitals, and governments, AIF has launched a three-pronged Phase 2 Emergency Response Strategy to address this crisis. Here is an overview.

The American India Foundation is committed to improving the lives of India’s underprivileged, with a special focus on women, children, and youth. AIF does this through high impact interventions in education, health, and livelihoods, because poverty is multidimensional. AIF’s unique value proposition is its broad engagement between communities, civil society, and expertise, thereby building a lasting bridge between the United States and India. With offices in New York and California, twelve chapters across the U.S., and India operations headquartered in Delhi NCR, AIF has impacted 6.7 million lives across 26 states of India.

Age: 24
Home Town: Bangalore, India
Education: BDes - Bachelor of Design, Industrial Design, MIT Institute of Design
Specific Field Interests: Design Research
Placement: Medha - Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh
Area of Focus: Technology/Innovation

Highlights: An industrial designer by training, Palak is a design researcher and strategist with a focus on designing socio-technical systems and services for emerging markets. A strong believer of the design process, her interests lie in healthcare and education with emphasis on social innovation and sustainability. Her past projects include game design, design research, ar/vr product design & diagnostic product development and after a summer at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Palak has joined Medha as AIF Clinton Fellow for 2016- 2017. By supporting existing college and high school students with employability training, leadership development, and career services Medha works to better prepare India's youth for life after school. Palak's project would involve articulating a comprehensive & unique student experience with an aim to maximize student interest & participation for their four signature programs. Extremely excited for her time at the fellowship, Palak would be looking to use ethnography/ design research tools to engage multiple stakeholders, better understand program limitations, bridge implementation gaps and devise methodologies for concept testing and iterations. She spends free time in general obsession of her absurdist poetry, graphic novels, photography, cats and occasional musical escapades.