A pioneer of life skills in India, Dream a Dream continues to empower young people from vulnerable backgrounds to overcome adversity and thrive, in addition to shifting the mindset about the purpose of Education to Thriving.
Having worked with over a million children in the last twenty-plus years, we have constantly been evolving to deepen and broaden our impact on the children and the system. In our innovation labs, through the direct delivery programmes in Bangalore—the Thriving Schools (formerly called After School Life Skills Programme) and Thriving Centres (formerly called Career Connect Programme) —which reaches 10,000 young people a year, we have demonstrated the long-term impact of life skills and SEL on young people growing up in adversity.
We are working towards transforming the public education system in partnerships with the government through levers of change such as innovative pedagogical approaches closely influencing 35,000 educators to develop their abilities to be caring and empathetic adults, mainstreaming life skills curriculum, teacher professional development, and assessments in Delhi, Uttarakhand, Telangana, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Nagaland. We are collaborating with organizations, individuals, and systems in the field, including the Aga Khan Foundation in Kenya reaching millions of children, leaders and stakeholders in public education systems to reimagine the purpose of education to thriving.
The Urgency
What are Life Skills?
Life skills are a group of psycho-social competencies and interpersonal skills that help people make informed decisions, solve problems, think critically and creatively, communicate effectively, build healthy relationships, empathize with others, and cope with and manage their lives healthily and productively.
Life Skills & Adversity
One in three children in India live in extreme poverty and have stunted and/or wasted growth. Children from vulnerable backgrounds are more likely to be exposed to a combination of adverse experiences (malnutrition, abuse, violence etc.) causing an irrefutable impact on their physical and mental health. Adversity causes debilitating social problems that include unemployment, crime, alcoholism, apathy, and poor economic conditions.
Dream a Dream works with young people from vulnerable backgrounds, who experience extreme adversity in their daily lives. Adversity affects their ability to engage with the world, make healthy life choices, and succeed. Empathy-based and transformative pedagogy, experiential learning, and mentoring ameliorate the effects of adversity by providing life skills to enhance growth, develop agency, and enable young people to become healthy adults who can fully participate in their communities.
Are life skills enough? The Need for Systems Change
Beyond young people’s personal resilience, grit, and capacity, compassion and empathy are needed for them to thrive in a just and equitable world. Unless we, as a society and systems, can hold ourselves to higher standards of equity and inclusion, just empowering young people with transformative life skills is not enough. To ensure that they are not constantly up against the same systemic barriers that prevent them from thriving, we must also be willing to transform. We must be willing to create a society, where the onus of success is not only on the young people but on all of us who make up the ecosystems around these young people. We must be willing to redefine success to be more equitable and inclusive so that all young people can thrive.
Our Strategy
To shift mindset about the purpose of Education to Thriving.
Our approach
At the center of Dream a Dream’s approach is the child. Through Direct Delivery, Replication, and Ecosystem change interventions, Dream a Dream has been pushing for systemic changes in India's Education Landscape reimagining the definition of success, and shifting the purpose of education to thriving.
The CHILD - Direct Impact
We work directly with 10,000 young people every year through our two innovation
labs - After School Life Skills Programme in Thriving School and Thriving Centre programs. In these innovation labs, new approaches to life skills development are introduced, demonstrated, and documented and insights are fed back into the larger framework to re-imagine the purpose of education to thriving.
After-School Life Skills Programme
We provide innovative, non-traditional educational opportunities through sports and arts to allow children to build important life skills such as teamwork, decision-making, problem-solving, and critical thinking. We partner with 20 schools in Bangalore and work with students from 8-14 years of age.
- 5000 young people year on year
- 95.9% of participants improved in life skills
- 95% retention
- 89% average attendance
Thriving Centers Programme
We run two centers in under-resourced neighborhoods for 15-23-year-olds to help develop the life skills required to make a healthy transition from adolescence to adulthood.
Here our programs in Computer Education, Spoken English, Communication Skills, Money Management, and Workplace Readiness are integrated with a high-impact life skills approach that prepares them for the job market and develops resilience, confidence, and adaptability needed to respond to the fast change of pace in the world around them.
- 5000 young people annually
- 99.9% of participants improved in life skills
- 93% retention
- 91% average attendance
The Ecosystem - Systems Demonstration
System Demonstration works towards transforming the public education system by partnering with the government through leverage of change such as curriculum, pedagogies, teacher training, and assessments.
The System demonstration team focuses on scaling the life skills approach, the core of what we have learned in Dream a Dream for the past 20 years. This endeavor creates great opportunities to contribute to the work of State Governments in implementing non-cognitive curricula like the Happiness Curriculum work with the Delhi, and Uttarakhand Governments. We look at direct impact by creating avenues for our Teacher Development Programme to train teachers across various states and contexts. There is also a strong focus on integrating this learning into the program design of various NGOs to reimagine their work with their stakeholders.
- 6 State Partnerships
- 2 Unique socio-emotional learning-based state-wide curricula
- Partnership with Aga Khan Foundation in Kenya
The programme creates transformative experiences for teachers/educators to re-imagine their role, demonstrate empathy, expand their creativity, develop listening and validation skills, and facilitate safe learning spaces in their classrooms. 9943 teachers and educators are trained in life skills approach to replicate the safe environment in their existing classrooms.
The programme creates transformative experiences for teachers/educators to re-imagine their role, demonstrate empathy, expand their creativity, develop listening and validation skills, and facilitate safe learning spaces in their classrooms. 9943 teachers and educators are trained in life skills approach to replicate the safe environment in their existing classrooms.
We invest in building evidence of the impact of our life skills programs through
quality research. The research helps us build a voice around the criticality and urgency to integrate life skills within learning outcomes. We also build a supportive community of practitioners, organizations, governments, and key stakeholders who help integrate life skills into education and shift the pure of education to thriving.
The Life Skills Assessment Scale (LSAS) has been developed by Dr. David Pearson & Dr. Fiona Kennedy. Their immense work has resulted in a paper co-authored by them along with Dream A Dream Cofounder, Vishal Talreja published in Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal in March 2014 (Kennedy, Pearson, Brett-Taylor & Talreja (2014).
This assessment tool was designed as a knowledge product that is translatable to the global south. It is a simple observation-based scale to be used by a facilitator of life skills programs.
Building the Field
Building the field focuses on shifting dominant narratives towards thriving as the purpose of education by weaving together people, places, and voices supported by high-impact research.
