Palak Shah Named IWER Senior Fellow

Palak Shah has been named a Senior Fellow of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research (IWER) at the MIT Sloan School of Management for the academic year 2024-2025.

Shah is an accomplished social innovator, a leader in workers’ rights for the new economy, and an expert on the future of work, low-wage workers, and care infrastructure. From 2013 to 2024, Shah served in executive roles at the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), where she was instrumental in shaping the organization’s strategic vision and institutionalizing a culture of experimentation, social entrepreneurship, and data-driven approaches to improve work for the nation's 2.5 million low-wage domestic workers. In 2015, she founded NDWA Labs, NDWA’s innovation lab focused on the future of care work.

As Executive Director of NDWA Labs, Shah led innovative initiatives, including the creation of Alia, an online portable benefits platform for domestic workers, and the development of the La Alianza chatbot, which engages over 230,000 Spanish-speaking workers and produces a large dataset on informal workers. During the pandemic, NDWA Labs partnered with Google.org to develop software that distributed $30 million in pandemic relief to unbanked domestic workers left out of federal relief. This open-source software project then enabled mayors, cities, and states to establish local relief funds.

Shah has been featured at high-profile forums, including events at the Federal Reserve, the Aspen Institute, MIT Solve, TEDx, and Harvard University. Her work has been covered by Stanford Social Innovation Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review and other publications.

Palak’s career spans the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. Prior to NDWA, she led the strategic implementation of the Affordable Care Act at Wellmont Health System and served as Deputy Director of Performance Management for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She also worked as a management consultant and as a community organizer, and she co-founded a public health nonprofit.

Shah holds a dual degree in Political Science and Broadcast Journalism from Northwestern University and a Master’s in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School. She currently serves as an advisor to WorkRise/Urban Institute, the Fund for New Leadership, and the Home Care Cooperative Initiative.

Some coverage about Shah and her work in recent years: 

• “A Conversation on Promoting our Care Providers, with Cynthia Breazeal and Palak Shah,” MIT Solve video, May 2022.
  
   
• Ai-jen Poo and Palak Shah, “Why Care Needs to be at the Heart of the New Economy,” Fast Company, June 24, 2021.
  
   
• Ai-jen Poo and Palak Shah, “The Future of Work Isn’t What People Think It Is,” The New York Times, June 24, 2020. 
  
   
• Corey Birns, “Housecleaning With Benefits,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2019. 
   
• “The Invisible Hands: As the Founder of NDWA Labs, Palak Shah MPP 2009 is Using Tech for Social Justice,” Harvard Kennedy School magazine, Spring 2019.
  
   
• Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, “Empowerment,” May 23, 2018.