Harvard Alumni for Global Women's Empowerment

Dharitri Patnaik has more than twenty six years of experience working to empower some of the most vulnerable sections of the society, including women, children, and underprivileged people of India. Dharitri has worked on a variety of issues and across various sectors in the areas of international development, poverty alleviation, social reform, women & child development - both from a policy and advocacy perspective as well as developing and managing on-the-ground operational  initiatives.  
In 2014 she founded Humara Bachpan Trust, which works with people living in poverty spread over  multiple cities and villages with 67,000 women and 1,35,000 children as active members.

In 2017 March she launched another new initiative called SAMBHAVI - Women’s  empowerment with enterprise and employability. Since its initiation, more than 50,000 women working in informal sector have been trained in life skills and more than 3,000 women living in urban and rural poverty have been trained in skill development. Humara Bachpan Trust was awarded a Special Project to work with urban poor women by the National Skill Development Corporation and also a project for Recognition of Prior Learning of farmers in rural Odisha. 

Dharitri is also the Chairperson of Diversified Energy Solutions Pvt Ltd a fast growing infrastructure company implementing various large scale industrial projects in Eastern India. Dharitri’s start up company Jivada Ventures Pvt Ltd is into hospitality and wellness. 

Dharitri’s organization Humara Bachpan Trust won an international award as the Best Youth Act by Peace Jam Foundation One Billion Acts and she won the Inspire Award in 2020 for leadership. She was felicitated by Ministry of MSME, Govt of India for being a successful woman entrepreneur and mentoring other women. Dharitri was also awarded the John Kenneth Galbraith Fellowship in Harvard. 

Dharitri is also the Founding Chairperson of the Bhubaneswar chapter of India’s leading women’s chamber of commerce - FICCI Ladies Organisation and National Initiative Heads for International Trade and Digital Literacy. 

Dharitri has a Masters in Social work from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard University, USA.

In addition, Marcello has been instrumental in the development of PNC’s Men As Allies program to accelerate women’s advancement, and serves on the working group of C&IB ForWARD (For Women’s Advancement, Recognition and Development). 

Marcello’s impassioned support for women’s leadership is evident in her extracurricular activities as well. Currently, she chairs the Barbara McNees Spirit of Athena Scholarship committee, which awards an annual scholarship to an emerging women leader in the Pittsburgh region to attend the Carnegie Mellon Executive Leadership Academy: Strategies for Advancing Women in Business. She is a founding member of Pittsburgh’s first women-focused angel investment fund, Next Act Fund; a loan review committee member for InvestPGH, a Community Development Financial Institution; a board member and grant committee member of the Birmingham Foundation; an Emeritus Board member of the multi-generational mentoring organization Strong Women, Strong Girls; an advisory board member of the Women Presidents Organization; and an adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches public and professional writing.

Before joining PNC in 2006, Marcello was president of PRwriting, Inc., a Pittsburgh-based firm that for nearly 20 years provided communications expertise to numerous companies and nonprofits. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Journalism & Communications from Point Park University.

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