GDI Americas Leadership Transition: Chintan Maru named GDI Americas CEO
Kicking off 2025, GDI has one new exciting development to start our year. Our board recently approved GDI Founder, Andrew Stern, to shift to devote his full-time capacity to the Global Coordinator role across our GDI entities. Chintan Maru, who many of you know as one of our leading senior Strategy and Build Directors, will be appointed to serve as CEO of the GDI Americas entity as of February 1st, 2025.
From the more than 80 social impact initiatives GDI has launched in the last ten years, two lessons on leadership stand out. First, organizations need the right leader at the right moment. A terrific founder may not be the right person to lead an organization in perpetuity. As an organization matures, new leadership capabilities are needed to get the organization to the next level. Second, we need both local leadership and global collaboration. The movement to localization should not come at the expense of global collaboration.
Our leadership transition reflects these learnings. Over the past few years, Andrew has played a coordinating role in helping structure and build out our global partners, alongside managing our GDI Americas entity. As Global Coordinator, he will facilitate collaboration across our global partners in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The role will allow our independent global partners to continue to drive their local strategies with a common purpose.
This shift will put Chintan formally into a leadership role that he began playing over the past year with GDI Americas and leverage his strong people leadership skills to continue to cultivate our talent. Under Chintan’s leadership, the strategy of GDI Americas will have a deeper emphasis on local social impact, including work on racial repair, inclusive societies, and democracy. It also includes an ongoing commitment to global work where the Americas has an outsize responsibility, such as migration opportunities and climate mitigation.
Thank you for being a valuable part of our journey as we continue turning good ideas into great social impact. We look forward to continuing our work together.
About Chintan Maru
Chintan Maru is CEO of GDI Americas and serves as Board Chair of GDI South Asia. Chintan previously served as the Managing Director at GDI Americas, where he led a portfolio of initiatives focused on compassion, dignity, and kindness.
He is the Founder and Principal of Leapfrog to Value, which is expanding financing for compassionate and high-quality health systems. Chintan serves on the founding team and board of the Dignity Restoration Project, a frontrunner in the American race reparations movement. He supported NEPI to expand its evidence-based violence prevention model in West Africa. He co-founded Oxygen Hub, a franchise business expanding oxygen access across Africa.
Prior to GDI, he was a leader in McKinsey & Co’s public and social sector practice. He started his career at Tower Street Prison in Jamaica, conducting ethnographic research on HIV. Chintan is a graduate of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and majored in political science at Duke University. He was a Public Policy and International Affairs Fellow at Princeton University and a Fulbright Scholar to Jamaica.