The Heller School for Social Policy and Management
The Center for Youth and Communities

Sangeeta Tyagi

Director, Center for Youth and Communities; Associate Director, Institute for Economic and Racial Equity; Senior Social Scientist and Lecturer

Sangeeta Tyagi, PhD'93, Senior Scientist and Lecturer

Sangeeta Tyagi is Director of the Center for Youth and Communities, Associate Director of the Institute for Economic and Racial Equity, and Senior Social Scientist at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Her work is at the intersection of opportunity, equity, and justice with a focus on workforce development, youth development, education, community development, and the organizational development of mission driven organizations. Her areas of interest and expertise include building cross-sector strategies for under- and unemployed youth and adult workers, postsecondary education access and success for first-in-family students, and youth engagement and leadership. She has a special interest in the organizational health and development, impact, scale, and sustainability of mission driven organizations and eco-systems. 

Dr. Tyagi teaches in the MPP program at Heller and Chairs the Women, Gender, and Sexuality concentration of the MPP program. She has served for thirteen years as the founding President of the Board of the YouthBuild Charter School of California based in Los Angeles, CA and is an invited External member of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at MDRC, a research and evaluation organization based in New York City, NY.

In addition, Sangeeta coaches numerous leaders of mission driven organizations on board development and engagement and overall organizational health; works with funders on strategy, innovation and impact; and has worked in India and Kenya with local anchor partners on the scale and sustainability of their youth employment strategies.

Prior to joining Brandeis, Dr. Tyagi served as President of YouthBuild USA, a national intermediary, where she oversaw the growth, quality, impact, innovative edge and sustainability of the YouthBuild network of 260 programs in the U.S. She has also served as Chief Operating Officer at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.

Sangeeta has also been a faculty member at Boston College, Roanoke College in Virginia, and at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She has a PhD in Sociology from Brandeis University.