Our Team

Our team works as a collective with partner organizations. We bring in facilitators, advocates, researchers, data analysts, coaches, and strategists who have considerable experience in dignity, justice and belonging work, and have conducted numerous equity assessments —including after incidents of discrimination or harassment or after concerns of a hostile environment have been raised. We bring considerable practical, legal, and analytical experience on how structures and policies impact and promote justice and belonging in the workplace. Our team brings deep and wide-ranging expertise and experience, and is multi-racial, gender-inclusive, intergenerational, and multi-lingual.

Anurima Bhargava, Founder and Director

Anurima Bhargava is the Founder and Director of Anthem of Us, a strategic advisory and consulting firm that centers dignity, justice, and belonging in workplaces, schools, and communities. Clients include leading financial institutions, corporations, foundations, schools, and media, arts, and non-profit organizations.  

From 2018-2022, she served as Chair and Commissioner of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, which documents and makes recommendations on religious persecution and violence abroad.  She made diplomatic visits to Burma, the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh, Iraq, Sudan, and Vietnam.  Her engagement across the Commission was recently profiled in the New York Times.

From 2010-2016, Bhargava led federal civil rights enforcement and policy in schools and higher education institutions across the nation at the U.S. Department of Justice; she spearheaded landmark guidance and litigation on school discipline, sexual harassment and violence, English Learners, and students with disabilities.  

She previously served as Director of the Education Practice and associate counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 2004-2010, where she litigated cases on diversity and segregation in schools and higher education institutions, including in the federal appellate courts and U.S. Supreme Court.

From 2016-2018, she was a fellow at the Institute of Politics and the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard, and a Leadership in Government Fellow at Open Society Foundations. 

Bhargava’s commitment to advancing dignity and justice through narrative and storytelling led her to produce and advise numerous documentary films and projects.  She chairs the U.S. Board of Doc Society, a leading incubator and supporter of documentary film globally.  Her recent projects include the Oscar-nominated documentary, Writing With Fire (Co-Executive Producer), Barefoot Empress (Executive Producer); and the HBO docuseries The Vow (Consulting Producer/Legal Advisor).

She co-chairs the National Advisory Board on Public Service at Harvard and serves on the board of the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund and Big Thought. She also serves as an advisor to GSV Ventures, Unbound Philanthropy and the Broadway Advocacy Coalition. She was a 2017 Presidential Leadership Scholar.

Bhargava advises numerous political campaigns and was appointed to the 2020 DNC Platform Committee. She founded Take Back Tuesdays and Anthem of America to provide information and ways to take action around elections, and a multiracial PAC, American Anthem.

Bhargava earned her law degree from Columbia Law School and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College. She was born and raised on the south side of Chicago.