Bio
Ritika Sharma Kurup, LISW-S is a PhD candidate and practitioner-scholar with over two decades of experience spearheading collective action justice efforts across the U.S. and India. As a community-engaged researcher, her work explores how community-led and place-based practices can drive systemic change. Her scholarship is guided by – (1) A focus on addressing the grand challenges that perpetuate structural inequalities. (2) A desire to center the voices of community residents and practitioners closest to these challenges. (3) A commitment to advancing practices and policies that improve opportunities and outcomes for marginalized communities. Ritika’s dissertation, Role of Power and Autonomy in Place-Based Upward Mobility, is a community-engaged mixed methods study. It aims to understand the concepts of power and autonomy in upward mobility efforts and develop recommendations for place-based initiatives. Additionally, Ritika has served as a research associate on multiple faculty projects and led her own grant-funded study on place-based change in Canada and Australia. This included spending time with over 300 practitioners at ChangeFest 2024 in Latji Latji Country, Mildura, Victoria, as a visiting researcher. Driven by a desire to bridge research and practice, Ritika actively works as a facilitator, coach, and partner with various community-based, national, and international coalitions. She previously served as Senior Director of Learning and Activation at StriveTogether, a national nonprofit network. Before that, as Director of Early Learning for Learn to Earn Dayton, she established Dayton’s first out-of-school network, serving over 1,000 students, and led Montgomery County’s Grade-Level Reading Campaign, which received an All-America City Award in 2017. Ritika was inducted into the Ohio State University College of Social Work’s Hall of Fame in 2021 and named a Children and Family Fellow by the Annie E. Casey Foundation in 2016. She holds master’s degrees in social work from the University of Delhi and The Ohio State University, along with a master’s in public policy from The Ohio State University. Ritika has taught undergraduate asynchronous courses and has extensive experience training and facilitating groups of adult learners, both in-person and virtually. She routinely presents her work at peer-reviewed conferences and other national platforms, and has two manuscripts under review, one as the first author. She is expected to graduate in May 2026.
Research Interests
Place-based change
Power and autonomy in economic-mobility
Community-ledchange
Collective impact
Systems change