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🏠 Home · 🌱 About · 👥 Team · 🛠️ Our Work · 📊 Impact · 📚 Knowledge · 🤝 Partners · 💚 Get Involved
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SUSTERA is 60% women-led. A small core team, more than fifty collaborators over nine years, and one working rule: we don't send strangers into communities. Everyone below works in the field. Nobody here is decorative.
Director Sustera Foundation
Two lines here: what she looks after, and what she did before joining.
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One specific thing she has done here — a named project, a number, a place.
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Co-founder & Director — Strategic Support
Sanju founded his first organisation at nineteen and came to climate work through postgraduate study at TISS Mumbai and field research across India. TEDx speaker and UN Youth Climate Leader, now building Heat Action Communities CIC — our bridge to international heat-resilience work.
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He designed the Climate Leadership Program in 2018 — 12 weeks, fully funded, taught in local languages. Sixteen cohorts and 220+ climate leaders later, it is still our flagship.
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Co-founder & Chief Executive
Deepa runs SUSTERA. An educator with more than two decades in social impact, co-founder and president of SARSAS, mentor to 120+ young leaders and a UN Women awardee — she holds our deepest community relationships across Amballoor, the coast and the schools.
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One specific thing she has done here — a named project, a number, a place.
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Director of Programs
Two lines here: what she looks after, and what she did before joining.
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One specific thing she has done here — a named project, a number, a place.
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Manager — Programs and Coordination (Kochi)
Agnus leads our climate action work in the Kochi division — the Wipro-supported Amballoor programme, from design through delivery — and holds the partnerships that keep it moving across panchayats, Kudumbashree units, Haritha Karma Sena and local institutions.
She works where climate meets local government: disaster management planning, gender, waste and community weather data, built into the routine business of a Panchayat rather than run alongside it. She is Vice President of the Climate Leaders Action Network (CLAN) and youth convener for Break Free From Plastic — India.
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She introduced climate change as a governance theme in Amballoor Panchayat where none existed — writing disaster management plans for panchayats with no technical support, and setting up a Gender Resource Centre with over ₹1 lakh of dedicated panchayat budget behind it. The programme now reaches roughly 50,000 people across two panchayats.
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Senior Program Officer
Adithya leads our coastal waste management work in Trivandrum and co-convenes Y-CLAP, our youth climate action platform.
He brings six years in the development sector, most of it spent alongside farmers on regenerative agriculture and carbon sequestration projects in Araku. An economics graduate with an executive master's in data science, he works at the join between behavioural science and technology — looking for solutions people will actually use.
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He built the coastal waste management programme in Trivandrum from the ground up — working ward by ward with local bodies — and keeps Y-CLAP running as a space where young people lead rather than attend.
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HR Coordinator & Social Media
Sana runs how SUSTERA sounds and how it stays organised — our social media, and the administrative and coordination work that keeps programmes moving.
A travel and tourism graduate and postgraduate with an e-MBA in HR and administration, she also holds a diploma in graphic design, which is where her own instincts have always pointed. She joined us as a social content creator and trained into admin and programme coordination from there.
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She coordinated the Sustainable Mobility Changemaker Programme alongside our senior officers, and now works with the Y-CLAP team.
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Program Officer — Kochi
Manjima coordinates our climate resilience and community-based sustainability work out of Kochi — running programmes on the ground, collecting and analysing field data, and holding the documentation and the relationships with communities and stakeholders together.
She holds an M.A. in Sociology and Disaster Management from Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady, and first came to SUSTERA as an intern before joining the team.
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As an intern she worked on the review and gap analysis of a Panchayat Disaster Management Plan — the fieldwork and the assessment frameworks behind it — and now leads programme delivery in Kochi.
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Program Officer Trivandrum
Two lines here: what she looks after, and what she did before joining.
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One specific thing she has done here — a named project, a number, a place.
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