Nexus of Good: Empowering the youth

In 1999, 11 volunteers came together to ensure dignity for every human being in India. Their interactions with children, in a home affected with HIV, opened their eyes to the complexity of the term ‘dignity’, when applied in a society as diverse and stratified as India. While interacting with young people from vulnerable backgrounds who experienced extreme adversities, they realised that surface-level engagement with young people was not enough, especially, when the intent was to prevent these adversities from defining their future. For young people to successfully face an unpredictable and complex future, Dream a Dream started life skills programmes to empower young people to navigate challenges arising out of adversity and build their ability to thrive. Started as a volunteer-run weekend programme, today it is an organisation that has pioneered life skills in public education in India.

At the centre of Dream a Dream's approach are the young people, who are empowered through a creative life skills methodology to overcome adversities and thrive. Their Direct Impact programme, running in Bangalore, is defining what ‘thriving’ looks like among young people across social identities, adversities and marginalisation through the creation of demonstrable models of both in-school and out-of-school learning spaces where young people thrive. The Thriving School model, run in partnership with 10 partner schools, uses life skill-oriented pedagogy through the medium of sports and arts, to create a nurturing learning environment for 8 to 14-year-olds to enable them to be resilient, responsible and happy. Their two Thriving Centres in Bangalore equip 15 to 23-year-olds with information, skills and access to opportunities to make meaningful life choices and a healthy transition from adolescence to adulthood. The focus is towards helping build agency among young people to challenge barriers and identify enablers for them to thrive by building important life skills such as teamwork, decision-making, problem-solving and critical thinking.

To address the challenge of quantifiable assessment of life skills programmes, the team looked at global standardised scales around the world which either measured only specific life skills or were not contextual to disadvantaged communities and explored the idea of developing an assessment scale of its own, and with the help of two UK-based clinical psychologists, Fiona Kennedy and David Pearson, built the Life Skills Assessment Scale (LSAS) to measure life skills in disadvantaged children in the developing world. After eight years of effort, the scale was published in the international journal named Social Behavior and Personality in 2014.

Impacting over 2,00,000 young people through their Direct Impact programme, insights from their life skills programme are scaled through their Systems Demonstration work to transform public education systems in partnership with government, through levers of change such as life skills oriented curriculum, pedagogies, teacher training, holistic assessments etc. They have trained over 35,000 teachers/educators in the life skills approach to replicate safe learning spaces in their classrooms. In 2018, they helped integrate the world’s largest in-school SEL curriculum in Delhi, with the Delhi Government and other non-profit partners, impacting 800,000 children through the Happiness Curriculum. An impact study by Brookings Institute, USA, showed better relations with teachers, increased participation in classes and increased focus and mindfulness among students. Dream a Dream was the WISE award winner in 2021 through this groundbreaking partnership with the Delhi government. With the success of the Happiness Curriculum, there is an increased acceptance of Life Skills as a part of the curriculum framework by different states and with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, a holistic integrated whole-child approach is the future of education in India. Currently, Dream a Dream is working with six state governments to implement a life skills-based curriculum for students in government schools impacting over three million children.

The COVID-19 pandemic showed us the resilience of young people while negotiating a world in disarray and responding to the enormous challenges that they were up against. However, when schools reopened and children were pushed to go back to ‘normal’ with no or little acknowledgement of the trauma and disconnection that they had experienced, the debate around the purpose of education intensified. Dehumanising the trauma undergone by millions of people and forcing young people to chase academic goals without addressing the loss they have undergone, makes the work of organisations like Dream a Dream more critical. To ensure that all children have access to equitable opportunities with dignity and inclusion in this complex world they live in, the organisation redefined its intent to create true systemic change, to work towards bringing change in the ecosystem around young people and to reimagine the purpose of education.

Dream a Dream is questioning the traditional notions of success, the narrow focus of the curricula on numeracy and literacy alone, the lack of significance given to the social-emotional-psychological well-being of our children and the skewed markers of success limiting them to getting a degree or a job. Today it is working to shift mindsets about the purpose of education to Thriving by addressing systemic inequities and working closely with the education ecosystem of policymakers, teachers, parents and the community that the young person inhabits. They dialogue with policymakers to change the purpose of the Indian education system, to build a global community of champions of thriving and are bringing together different organisations and individuals and scripting the change by introducing transformative practices into the ecosystem. While aiming to create a world based on the values of equity, dignity and inclusion, they are first replicating an interconnected collaborative organisation, with these values, within Dream a Dream. Under the inspired leadership of Suchetha Bhat, they have proved that the life skills approach to learning can transform school education. They provide a platform for young people living with adversity to present their challenges, struggles, issues, concerns, ideas, innovations and perspectives on solving societal issues on national and global platforms. A certified Great Place to Work (2021-2022) along with being a three-time regional finalist of the India NGO of the Year Award, runner-up at the GDN Most Innovative Project Award and winner of the 2020 Football for Good award by Common Goal, Dream a Dream is constantly demonstrating that such models can easily be scaled through diverse collaborations to ensure that every child can thrive if we shift mindsets around the purpose of education to thriving.

Dream a Dream is a wonderful example of Nexus of Good where Sucheta Bhatt and her committed team are focussing on life skills to transform how school education happens. The model is already scaling through public-private partnerships.

Views expressed are personal