Principal and Co-Founder
Rupal supports clients in building philanthropic practices that are relational, strategic, and resilient.
Rupal Soni has overseen more than 60 organizational partnerships and $4.6 million in annual grants, co-designed a $2.5 million pilot initiative directing capital toward organizational care and healing justice, and built the $8 billion infrastructure for one of the largest family foundations in the nation. Her practice sits at the intersection of rigorous grantmaking, trust-based design, and a commitment to the communities that change happens through — not just for. She is interested in capital that moves outcomes, not capital that moves optics.
Her institutional grantmaking career spans the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, Field Foundation of Illinois, Fire this Time at Crossroads Fund, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Paul M. Angell Family Foundation. Because of her extensive experience, she has a fierce vision of what philanthropy is capable of and how we must be accountable to the people we serve.
Rupal is also an award-winning multidisciplinary artist whose community arts practice has taken her from building a Rural Design School on the India-Pakistan border to speaking engagements about the power of the arts across the nation. Her creative practice is not peripheral to her consulting — it is the source of her ability to design programs that center radical imagination, and to hold a culture of inspiration, clarity, and belonging even when the work gets hard.
She approaches every engagement as a partner, a collaborator, with expertise rooted in lived experience and integrity. As a founder of Sovereign Good, she anchors the firm's capacity building, program design, and facilitation, and community-of-practice offerings — and she is the reason those offerings carry both rigor and care.
Her field-building work includes Lead Consultant with Philanthropy for Asian American Action in Chicago, in partnership with Chicago Latines in Philanthropy, Chicago African Americans in Philanthropy, and Asian American/ Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy; the Core Design Team of the Midwest Funder Organizing with Neighborhood Funders Group; and Board of Directors for Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy. She also holds a Masters in Social Service Administration from the University of Chicago, Crown Family School of Social Work, focused on Philanthropy, Program Evaluation, and Cultural Policy, and a Bachelor's Degree in Advertising from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.