Aradhna Oliphant

Aradhna serves as the Chief Operations and Strategy Officer for the Wallis Annenberg Legacy Foundation. In this role she manages all the operations of the foundation and provides oversight to its operating entities including PetSpace and GenSpace.

Originally from India, Aradhna is a recent resident of the great State of California having spent many years in leadership in the philanthropic sector in Pennsylvania. Purposeful and positive, Aradhna is a thoughtful listener. She has extensive experience in governance through appointments to public and private sector boards including the board of a publicly traded financial services company with over ten billion in assets. Aradhna is a respected thinker on leadership; her work on building bridges across sectors and institutions earned her two Honorary Doctorates, one from Robert Morris University in 2015 and the second from Waynesburg University in 2016.

She served as the President of the International Women’s Forum of Western PA from 2017.2019 and now chairs the Philanthropy Steering Committee for IWF Global. Since moving to California, she has been invited to serve on the Board of the National Conflict Resolution Center, IWF Southern California/Trusteeship; and the Dean’s Advisory Board for Rady School of Business at UCSD.

An entrepreneur by nature, she was among the first ones in the world to be granted a TEDx license when TED was exploring the roll out of locally produced TED conferences. Her passion for innovation and admiration for military service led to the development of the first-ever strengths-based program for post 9/11 Veterans in the country which garnered a national award as well as an invite to be a member of the National Security Seminar of the US Army War College.

At her departure from the Pittsburgh region in June 2022, several community leaders and regional foundations took the initiative to voluntarily establish an Aradhna Award to be given annually to individuals, in Southwestern PA, who exemplify her leadership values. The national Association for Leadership Programs (ALP) honored her with their highest honor; the office of Veterans Affairs for the state of Pennsylvania recognized Aradhna’ s service to military veterans with their highest civilian honor.

She has been featured in various print and online publications and her writing for the Pittsburgh Quarterly won the regional Golden Quill; she has also been an invited speaker at TEDx.

Aradhna is fluent in both English and Hindi; she holds an MBA from Rutgers University and was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa at her graduation in 1992; she received the prestigious Gold Medal for achieving the highest rank in the entire University of Bhopal, India, for Master of Psychology in 1987. She enjoys discovery, reading, and cooking and is the proud mother of two grown sons.