The first two years of my journey in the development sector began as a Teach for India Fellow (TFI) in an all-girls low-income classroom in South Delhi. By 2017, I transitioned out of TFI to officially register SOL as a non-profit. Since then, we have been working full time towards ensuring that children, no matter who they are or where they come from, can find their voice and experience the world through it.
Tell us more about your background and journey.
The first two years of my journey in the development sector began as a Teach for India Fellow (TFI) in an all-girls low-income classroom in South Delhi. After this, I moved on to work as a Program Manager and Summer School Leader with Teach for India, where I was involved in coaching fellows and other program managers, delivering learning outcomes for children, and managing a school too!
Our labour of love, Slam Out Loud (SOL), began as a small project in the class that our co-founder Jigyasa and I were teaching in.
SOL and its vision fervently asserted its magic on us to create space for itself in our busy schedules.
In 2017, I transitioned out of TFI to officially register SOL as a non-profit. Since then, we have been working full time towards ensuring that children, no matter who they are or where they come from, can find their voice and experience the world through it.
What is the inspiration behind your NGO and the projects?
Owing to our experiences of working with students from low-income classrooms, we realised that conventionally, our aspirations for children from disadvantaged communities are at best, limited to academic success or employment. And when we do this, we prevent children from being able to really unfurl their full potential.
As children, both Jigyasa and I had been so empowered by the arts that we wanted to introduce it in our classroom. We wanted to look at what was possible beyond just the outcomes of well-being in children, outcomes that can build the skills required to help them thrive in the world.
We started by introducing Slam Out Loud as a small project in our TFI classroom, hoping to bring art and artistic opportunities to the 50 children that we worked with.
Slowly, the project spread to other classes and schools and we started doing more art workshops with other children in the city. At one point, when we did a workshop about emotions in Kashmir, all that the children could come up with were emotions of anger, sadness, hate and we realised such spaces for children to express what they really feel should not be ‘good to have’ but a ‘must-have’.
When the project started scaling up, We realised that we could not do this alone and started our flagship program - the Jijivisha Fellowship, where we could place artists as role models in classrooms and translate their passion for the arts to enable children to find their voice and build the necessary skills.
How do art forms help kids' overall development?
Thomas Merton famously quotes, “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time”, signifying that art is a deeply personal activity that both helps us explore and expand on our experience of who we are. Art also helps us enhance our perception of the world, our connection and communication with others, and our quality of emotional and physical living.
By providing spaces for art-based learning that are traditionally inaccessible to children from low-income communities, we build in them, the 21st-century skills of critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity, fostering leadership that can drive universal change. The Economic Development Quarterly offers an insight that children who received art education showed an 80% increase in creativity and levels of social skills.
The ‘National Endowment for the Arts’ observed that students partaking in arts courses had higher grade point averages and were five times more likely to graduate compared to their peers. And yet, the student to art teacher ratio in a progressive state like Delhi is 1:1400 which means less than 20 hours of art based education for each child in a year. Unsurprisingly, this number is even lower for children from vulnerable communities.
The diverse group of children, youth and prisoners that we work with, in these communities discover their voices through the transformational power of the arts enabling them to become creative thinkers who dream bigger, achieve more and create their future.
Could you elaborate on the need for social change and how to go about it?
Owing to the lack of relevant and engaging opportunities that empower them with agency and voice, 444 Million children in India are disempowered to break the cycles of negative outcomes. When schools function on rote-learning models focused solely around reading, writing and arithmetic; we not only disempower children from creatively approaching their own problems but also hinder their ability to become leaders and changemakers who will take initiative in their communities and in the world.
Our children are left ill-equipped for the challenges of the 21st century, because of the lack of a holistic curriculum, spaces, and experiences that empower them with a voice.
At SOL we believe that one of the most effective tools to enable children to find their voice is art - whether it be storytelling, visual art, poetry or even theatre! Our aim is to provide individuals with access to these mediums in a way that combines the arts with education and leadership. We do this by using artistic activities and arts-based learning in at-risk communities to instill Creative Confidence skills in children, like Communication, Empathy, Critical Thinking, Self Esteem et cetera and foster well-being and socio-emotional learning.
Our experiences have taught us that when individuals take this beautiful journey, they become empowered to realise and find their voice - a process that is fundamental towards creating leaders who can change lives.
Our work ranges from working with learning spaces (such as in classrooms and in other formal and informal learning centres for drop-out children as well as in Tihar Jail), hosting workshops and providing other kinds of help, spanning over 26 unique learning spaces.
Could you tell us more about The Jijivisha Fellowship and Arts For All project?
The Jijivisha Fellowship is an initiative by Slam Out Loud where art practitioners work with children and youth in marginalised communities to build creative expression through poetry, theatre, storytelling, or visual arts. In the process, the fellows and their students build leadership, expression, and mindfulness, amongst a host of other values and mindsets.
The transformational power of the arts, of working with children, of operating with grit, resourcefulness, and reflection, is what allows the Jijivisha Fellowship to live up to its name. The Jijivisha fellowship has so far impacted 38 Communities and 6500+ children through 68 Fellows and 100 Artist Volunteers.
Through the Arts For All project - which has now reached 600 children over two communities - exceptional artists create a contextual and rigorous art program to enable children to solve local challenges in budget private and government schools. The sessions are facilitated weekly, leading to an end-of-program showcase for the children to display their learning on a wider platform.
What is your idea of success or your mantra in life?
The one value I resonate with, that is common to all successful people, is consistency. The ability to be able to show up every day, to be consistently present, makes a world of difference. In my opinion, it is this that is the key to ultimate success.
Interviewed by - Shruti Gupta
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