Chicago, IL

Deepa Gupta is a strategic consultant based in Chicago. She currently serves as the project director for an emerging initiative called the Community Food Navigator. The Navigator exists to support community-led food production by Black, Brown and Indigenous growers and food producers with a vision to advance food sovereignty, mutual care, and economic opportunity. This project is working to build a community-stewarded model to share, protect, and use information and data to amplify the abundance of community-led efforts and direct resources to grow and sustain those efforts prioritized by and for community food system growers and builders.

She started her career in health care at the Advisory Board Company, USAID, and McKinsey & Company, where she focused on hospitals, health systems, domestic and global public health. Gupta followed that with strategic and programmatic roles at the MacArthur Foundation serving the Chicago arts and culture sector, international nonprofit partnerships, and capacity building for paradigm-shifting nonprofits globally through the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. From 2012-2016, she directed The Boeing Company’s community investment strategies in education and workforce development from pre-K to post-secondary education. From 2017-2019, she stood up and led a new team at Boeing focused on organizational strategy, change, performance management, and culture transformation. In 2019, she founded Blue Lotus Advisors, a social impact consultancy.

Gupta earned a BA in public policy and biology at the University of Chicago with a focus on health access and quality of care; an MBA at Northwestern University; and an MPA at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government with a focus on public health, human rights, and economic development.