Nikishka Iyengar is an economic and community development practitioner, researcher, and educator working at the intersection of political economy, urban planning, and social movements. Her work examines how racial capitalism has shaped the built environment and investigates alternative systems of ownership, governance, and finance that build toward just and liberatory spatial imaginaries.
Nikishka is the Founder and CEO of The Guild, a development cooperative that builds community-owned real estate in partnership with residents, grassroots organizations, public agencies, and anchor institutions. In partnership with her team at The Guild, Nikishka created the Community Stewardship Trust, an institutional model that democratizes wealth and power through shared ownership of commercial real estate development. She is also the Founder and Managing Director of Groundcover, a $30M integrated capital fund focused on seeding and scaling community-owned land projects, and a founding board member of the People’s Community Land Trust in Atlanta, working to decommodify land and create permanently affordable housing outside the speculative market.
Her work spans the design of ownership structures, governance systems, financing mechanisms, and development processes that enable communities to collectively shape and benefit from neighborhood investment. Drawing from traditions of solidarity economics, cooperative development, and community organizing, she investigates how institutions can be designed to distribute power more broadly and how communities can build the capacity to steward land and shared resources across generations.
Nikishka was a 2025 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is currently a Democracy Visiting Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Next City, and Nonprofit Quarterly. Nikishka is currently working on a book project tentatively titled The Means Are the Ends: Building Economic Democracy and a World Beyond Capitalism.