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 CEO
Anurima Bhargava is the Founder andCEO 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, discrimination 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.
A central pillar of Anthem of Us’s work is advancing dignity and justice through narrative and storytelling. Bhargava has produced and advised numerous documentary films and projects, including the Oscar-nominated and Peabody-winning documentary, Writing With Fire, Peabody-winning While We Watched; Emmy-nominated Our Body Politic, A Shot At History, The Inquisitor, Barefoot Empress, Patang and the HBO docuseries The Vow. She recently premiered her directorial debut, Teaching America, which chronicles the students and teachers who joined together to stand up for African-American Studies classes in Arkansas.
Bhargava chairs the U.S. Board of Doc Society; 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 Democracy House. She serves on the Capacity Council for Brown Girls Doc Mafia and the leadership committee of Crimson Courage.
Bhargava advises numerous political campaigns and was appointed to the 2020 DNC Platform Committee. She co-founded a multi-racial PAC, Anthem of America, and is an advisor to South Asians for America. She is a 2017 Presidential Leadership Scholar.
Bhargava graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, and was elected Chief Marshal of her Harvard class. She earned her law degree from Columbia Law School. She was born and raised on the south side of Chicago, and is a graduate of Kenwood Academy.