2020 campaign of Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg hires another Indian-American

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The presidential campaign of South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, recently hired an Indian-American who had worked in the Obama White House, in a top position.

Sonal Shah, 51, executive director of the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown University, was recently recruited as the national policy director in Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign.

Shah is currently accompanying Buttigieg on a #RVAcrossAmerica road trip, posting photos on her Twitter account.

Shah was Vice President at Goldman Sachs from 2004-2007; she also worked at Google as head of global development initiatives 2007-2009. ,

Buttigieg has hired other Indian-Americans on his campaign team prior to this, including National Investment Chair Swati Mylavarapu.

The new channel cnbc.com reported that Mayor Pete’s campaign, anticipating criticism from the left to Shah’s stint at Goldman Sachs, or Google, put out a statement by the National Press Secretary Chris Meagher, saying that while at Goldman Sachs Shah “wasn’t involved in any deals nor did she benefit from any deals,” and focused only on environmental policies of the investment firm; and that her stint at Google was “in the philanthropy side of Google, not the company side.”

Shah’s biography on the Beeck Center website details her work in the Obama administration where she was deputy assistant to the President and founded the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. She also worked as an ‘international economist” at the U.S. Treasury Department helping set up the central bank in Bosnia, and working in post-conflict reconstruction in Kosovo, implementing  poverty reduction strategies in Africa, and financial crises Asia and Latin America.

Early in her life, Shah and her siblings created Indicorps, a non-profit to build socially conscious global leaders, and inspired social enterprises in India like Teach for India and Sarvajal, the biography says.