Elsa Marie D’Silva

ElsaMarie D’Silva is the Founder and CEO of Red Dot Foundation (India) and President of Red Dot Foundation Global (USA). Its platform Safecity, crowdsources personal experiences of sexual violence and abuse in public spaces. Since Safecity started in Dec 2012, it has become the largest crowd map on the issue in India and abroad.

ElsaMarie is a 2020 IWF Fellow and a Gratitude Network Fellow, 2019 Reagan Fascell Fellow, a 2018 Yale World Fellow and an alumni of the Stanford Draper Hills Summer School, the US State Department’s Fortune Mentoring Program, Oxford Chevening Gurukul and the Duke of Edinburgh’s Commonwealth Leadership Program. She is also a fellow with Rotary Peace, Aspen New Voices, Vital Voices and a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader. She is listed as one of BBC Hindi’s 100 Women and has won several awards including Government of India Niti Aayog’s #WomenTransformingIndia award and The Digital Woman Award in Social Impact by SheThePeople.

In 2017, ElsaMarie was awarded the Global Leadership Award by Vital Voices in the presence of Secretary Hillary Clinton. She is also the recipient of Gold Stevie Award for Female Executive of the Year – Government or NonProfit -10 or Less Employees in 2016. Her work has been recognized by the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations through the Intercultural Innovation Award, SDG Action Festival and the UN Foundation at the Solutions Summit 2016. She has penned articles that have appeared in CNN, Huffington Post, WIP amongst others. She has spoken about her work at the Rotary International Assembly 2019, Aspen Ideas Festival, at TEDx MidAtlantic, UN Women, State Department, Vital Voices South to South Leadership Summit. She has been a panelist for World Bank, NDI, USIP, SheThePeople and hosted a roundtable at the Bloomberg CityLab London 2015. Prior to Safecity, ElsaMarie was in the aviation industry for 20 years where she worked with Jet Airways and Kingfisher Airlines. Her last portfolio was Vice President Network Planning & Charters where she oversaw the planning and implementation of 500 daily flights.