Ep. 33: Improving housing for India's urban poor with Rakhi Mehra
From a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford and an MBA at Harvard Business School, to disaster-relief in India, and founding a social enterprise to address India’s housing needs (all while training for triathlons and teaching entrepreneurship & yoga), my latest guest has done it all. Working with an interdisciplinary group of architects, software developers and microfinance experts, Rakhi and her husband Marco Ferrario launched Micro Home Solutions which provides consulting and digital design input to homeowners and NGOs to build better quality and safer housing for urban poor.
Hear Rakhi share how she turned her commitment to social impact into a career, what life is like in the lake district of Italy and how she navigates the ups and downs of a social enterprise start-up as a mother of two while teaching students - the full episode is below, on your favorite podcast app, or on iTunes and please do subscribe, so you don’t miss an episode!
P.S. This episode was recorded March 5, 2020 in the early days of the lockdown in northern Italy, where Rakhi is based.
SHOWNOTES FOR EPISODE 33:
Rakhi and Marco’s social enterprise MicroHomeSolutions
More on social enterprise and other things we discussed:
Banker to the Poor by Grameen Bank’s founder Muhammad Yunus
A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life by Jack Kornfield
Teaching by Heart: One Professor's Journey to Inspire by Thomas DeLong
Follow us on Instagram for more on Rakhi and everything we mentioned in this episode!
Special thanks to Sagar Sarkar and the team @ Flying Carpet Productions for audio post-production engineering!
