Gayathri Shukla

PPF’s TD Fellow for Economic and Financial Inclusion

Gayathri Shukla is the Founder of Campfire Kinship, a social impact agency providing story-based training, advisory, and creative media to help diverse teams uncover their strengths, and build empathy skills. She holds an electrical engineering degree from the University of Calgary, and an Executive MBA from Queen’s University. Gayathri has over 17 years of engineering and leadership experience in the energy and mining sector. She started her career working in technical, field-based roles. From there, she progressively moved into leadership roles, first as an engineering manager, accountable for global teams designing the automation scope for a $17Billion greenfield facility, and then as the integration manager spearheading the safe and on-time start-up of this facility. Prior to starting her own company, Gayathri led digital transformation programs leveraging human-centered design – a topic she researched and implemented through her MBA thesis. Gayathri has volunteered with the Board of Directors at Calgary Immigrant Women’s Association for the past 3 years, most recently serving as Chair of its Finance Committee. She also hosts the podcast Hearth 2 Heart at her local community radio station, CJSW 90.9, where she spotlights diverse role models. She was awarded two grants from Calgary Arts Development, one for a video storytelling project to build empathy across differences, and the second, for an anthology on the stories of resilient immigrant women. As a story-crafting instructor, Gayathri is leading this group of 35+ participants through the process of writing their stories, and is planning to publish the book later this year.

PPF is grateful to TD and its support of the PPF TD Fellowship for Economic and Financial Inclusion