Ankita Chachra is the Knowledge for Policy Director at the Bernard Van Leer Foundation. In her role, she extracts, curates, and disseminates knowledge to scale-up early childhood and Urban95 initiatives. She hopes this work will help create cities that provide sustainable and equitable access to all children and their caregivers while giving them opportunities to achieve their full potential to contribute back to society. Before joining the Foundation in September 2020, Ankita worked at NACTO’s Global Designing Cities Initiative (GDCI), where she addressed street and public space challenges. Her work focused on design implementation and building capacity to develop-and-apply strategies for creating safe and healthy cities. She found her passion for prioritizing the needs of children and caregivers in urban environments while leading the Streets for Kids programme, that published the guide on Designing Streets for Kids. She was also part of the core team that developed the Global Street Design Guide – the first-ever worldwide guideline for designing city streets – and led road safety projects under Bloomberg’s Initiative for Global Road Safety, primarily in Latin American and Asian cities. Ankita has a Masters in Urban Design from Columbia University, New York and a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture from the Sushant School of Art and Architecture.