Simran Arora is a second-year MPP candidate at Harvard Kennedy School with experience spanning global philanthropy, refugee education, and gender-responsive development. Before HKS, she worked at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, where she advised donors on over $150M in cross-border grantmaking across the U.S., Asia, and Africa, with a focus on climate justice, racial and gender equity, and locally led solutions. She has also worked with social impact organizations and nonprofits across Indonesia, India, Denmark, and the United States. This past summer, she was a Climate Summer Fellow at the World Bank Group, working on heat resilience, sustainable cooling, and climate philanthropy strategy. Her policy interests sit at the intersection of philanthropy, climate, and gender across the Global South. Simran grew up in Delhi, India, and completed her undergraduate degree in Psychology at Claremont McKenna College in California.
At the Mittal Institute, her research examines climate-led displacement in South Asia through three connected threads: contemporary migration patterns, displacement rooted in the history of Partition, and forward-looking analysis of climate displacement and the policy frameworks needed to anticipate it. She also explores how philanthropic giving and civil society respond to, and shape, displacement and adaptation.
