Deepak Bhargava, President, The JPB Foundation
Elected by The JPB Foundation’s board in 2023, Deepak Bhargava assumed the role of president full time in February 2024 after many years as a grantee, board member, and board vice chair of the Foundation.
Bhargava brings over 30 years of expertise in social justice movements as a leader, campaigner, and strategist.
Since 2019, he has been a distinguished lecturer at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. He previously led Community Change for 16 years, where he worked to strengthen the community organizing field and launched coalitions that achieved major policy reforms at the federal level on issues such as poverty, health care, and immigration.
Bhargava has trained and mentored hundreds of leaders who’ve play key roles in progressive organizations and social justice movements, and, more recently, he co-founded a new organization, Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice, which trains and supports early and mid-career people working for social change, especially people of color, women, LGBTQ people, and people from working class backgrounds.
He has served on the boards of numerous organizations, including the Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights, the Open Society Foundations (US), and 350.org, where he was Board Chair. He currently serves on the board of the Democracy Fund.
Bhargava is the co-author of Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World with Stephanie Luce (New Press, 2023) and co-editor of Immigration Matters: Movements, Visions, and Strategies for a Progressive Future with Ruth Milkman and Penny Lewis (New Press, 2021). He was a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute from 2020-2023, where he co-authored The Statue of Liberty Plan: A Progressive Vision for Migration in the Age of Climate Change with Rich Stolz and The Death of “Deliverism” in Democracy Journal with Shahrzad Shams and Harry Hanbury, which explores the relationship of economic policy to political allegiances.
He has written extensively about community organizing, public policy related to poverty and economic justice, progressive strategy, civic engagement, and racial justice among many other topics for The New York Times, The Guardian, USA Today, The Nation, The American Prospect, Huffington Post, and Democracy Journal, and he has been featured in major news outlets such as National Journal, The Washington Post,Politico, National Public Radio, and MSNBC.
Bhargava is married to Harry W. Hanbury, a documentary filmmaker. He was born in Bangalore, India and grew up in New York City, where he currently resides.