Deepa Gupta
Deepa Gupta is a Chicago-based strategy consultant, professional coach and facilitator with 20+ years of experience in the nonprofit, public, and private sectors. She is the Founder and Principal of Blue Lotus Advisors, a strategic consultancy that works with clients to mobilize community, public and private sector resources, roles and responsibilities toward shared social and economic goals.
As an executive coach and facilitator, she is an active listener, inclusive, and oriented to support self-awareness, truthful dialogue, planning and action to support progress by helping people identify the shifts needed to make change. Deepa brings an equity and justice-orientation to her coaching work with Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, local, national and global philanthropies, U.S. government agencies, and nonprofits ranging from local organizers to large, federated organizations, all leading impactful work across topics such as public and global health, arts and culture, early education, economic mobility, climate and environmental justice.
She is especially attuned to working with professionals in transition – by choice or by circumstance – who are working between sectors or disciplines and learning to direct their skills and frames of thinking and doing in new contexts. Her coaching has supported organizers moving into philanthropy, corporate executives considering government and nonprofit work, and business leaders seeking to build and develop more inclusive, diverse and equitable strategic and operating norms and practices in their product, service, or functional teams.
Her executive coaching and leadership team effectiveness practice includes clients such as The Mellon Foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation, and Loyola University’s DEI Institute focused on supporting working executives in sectors such as manufacturing, financial services, real estate and healthcare, learning to integrate DEI efforts into core strategic, business and operational practices.
Her past experiences include corporate executive roles with The Boeing Company in organizational strategy, change, performance management and culture transformation for business teams and as a community investment strategist for the company’s global philanthropy focused on early childhood, primary and secondary education. She served in strategic and programmatic roles at the MacArthur Foundation, and started her career in health care at the Advisory Board Company, USAID, and McKinsey & Company, with a focus on hospitals, health systems, domestic and global public health.
Deepa holds an AB with honors in public policy and biology from the University of Chicago; an MBA from Kellogg SOM at Northwestern; and an MPA from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She currently serves on the boards of the Poetry Foundation; the National Council on the Arts at the invitation of President Obama; and Project Y Theatre Company. She is married and resides in Oak Park, Illinois, with her partner, two teenagers, and mother.