Nikishka Iyengar

Nikishka is a social entrepreneur, community organizer, writer, and podcast host with over a decade of experience building economic democracy. As founder and CEO of The Guild, she has helped create a cooperative ecosystem in Atlanta that enables communities to control their economic futures and build deep democracy through collective ownership models. The Guild is a worker-owned cooperative, building community-owned models of land, housing and real estate as a means to close the racial wealth gap and create self-determination for marginalized communities. Nikishka is also the founder and Managing Director of Groundcover, a $30M impact investing fund focused on shared equity models.

Nikishka is a 2025 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and her work has been featured in the New York Times, Next City, and Nonprofit Quarterly. She has previously completed fellowships at UC Berkeley’s Terner Lab and the Aspen Institute, and served on Atlanta’s Guaranteed Income Task Force. Nikishka is co-host and producer of Road to Repair, a podcast exploring the path from a “business-as-usual” economy to one grounded in justice and collective liberation. She is currently working on a book project tentatively titled The Means Are The Ends: Building Economic Democracy and a World Beyond Capitalism.