For California-based Sridar Iyengar, a career spanning three decades at the highest levels of global accountancy and corporate governance was never going to be the whole story. The co-founder of 360Plus Foundation has spent years directing his energy, networks, and resources toward a conviction that young people from underserved communities deserve access to the kind of transformative experiences that most of the world takes for granted.
Building 360Plus Foundation on the power of experiential learning
The organisation Iyengar co-founded, 360Plus Foundation, is built around the idea that travel is not a luxury but an educational instrument. The foundation designs and funds immersive learning journeys for high school students from low-resourced communities across multiple countries, working on the premise that direct encounters with the world build confidence, cultural fluency, and expanded ambition in ways that no classroom can fully replicate.
Photo Credit: 360Plus Foundation
Leadership Collective: Structured travel as a youth development tool
The foundation’s flagship initiative, Leadership Collective, has taken hundreds of high school students from underserved backgrounds across 10 countries on immersive programmes in India. Under Iyengar’s stewardship, the programme operates as a structured learning intervention, engaging young participants with India’s geography, culture, history, and civic life through direct experience rather than secondhand study.
Reaching across borders: Ukraine, Tanzania, and the Indian diaspora
Iyengar has consistently pushed 360Plus’s reach beyond familiar geographies. In 2019, he led the foundation’s partnership with Indiaspora to execute HeritageIndia, a three-week immersive programme for students of Indian origin across New Delhi, Gujarat, and Kerala, built around themes of history, culture, diversity, and democracy.
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In 2023, 360Plus organised a fully funded three-week educational journey across the United States for eight Ukrainian students from Kyiv, aged 12 to 19, who travelled through Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington DC, and New York for university visits, technology campus tours, and cultural exchanges, a deliberate act of global exposure for young people living through war. That same year, a 360Plus community visit to Tanzania led to an on-ground partnership with Femme International to deliver menstrual hygiene products and health education to girls at the Ololosokowan Primary School, reflecting Iyengar’s broader philosophy that travel should leave communities better than it found them.
Sponsoring APV School in the hills of Uttarakhand
Closer to home, Iyengar has anchored 360Plus’s support behind APV School in Uttarakhand, a distinctive institution serving children in one of northern India’s more remote regions. The foundation is the school’s principal sponsor, providing the sustained financial backing that keeps quality education accessible in an area where such infrastructure remains sparse.
AVP School in Uttarakhand | Photo Credit: 360Plus Foundation
TechPals: A digital bridge across geographies and social divides
Recognising that not every initiative needs an aeroplane ticket, Iyengar helped develop TechPals, a global digital pen-pal programme that connects secondary school students from underserved communities in India with members of the 360Plus network worldwide. Through regular email exchanges, students practise English, encounter perspectives shaped by entirely different geographies, and begin to imagine professional and academic futures beyond their immediate surroundings. The programme’s strength lies in its simplicity: it requires only basic internet access, making it replicable, scalable, and available to students for whom international travel remains out of reach.
Civic technology and the fight for cleaner governance
Iyengar’s sense of public responsibility extends to the systems that hold societies together. As a governing board member of Janaagraha Center for Citizenship and Democracy, he co-created ipaidabribe.com, a platform that allows citizens to report bribery and corrupt transactions anonymously, turning individual frustration into aggregated civic data visible to the public and to policymakers. He also served as President of the Foundation for Democratic Reforms in India, directing efforts to strengthen democratic institutions and electoral processes across the country.
Mentoring entrepreneurs and investing in early-stage ideas
As past President of TiE Silicon Valley, TiE Global, and TiE Mumbai, the world’s largest entrepreneurship network, Iyengar has spent decades mentoring founders and investing in early-stage startups, with a particular focus on the US-India corridor.
He served on the board of the American India Foundation, overseeing the Clinton Fellowship, which places young professionals within Indian civil society organisations. He remains an active mentor and angel investor, engaging directly with founders at the ideation and pre-seed stage, bringing to that work the same belief that animates everything else: that the right support, at the right moment, changes the trajectory of a life.
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