To see and engage: Dignity through Education

Vishal Talreja is an Educator and Social Entrepreneur. He co-founded Dream a Dream, a registered, charitable trust empowering children and young people from vulnerable backgrounds to overcome adversity and flourish using a creative life skills approach. Vishal has co-authored 4-research papers related to Life Skills in the Indian context and has written a host of articles, white papers, policy briefs related to Education Transformation. He has also co-authored a book, ‘When We Thrive, Our World Thrives’ along with Dr Connie K Chung and Dream a Dream staff and participants. He has also published a book of poems called, ‘My Soul Stirring’.

Care homes for HIV positive children are places where well-meaning volunteers regularly donate money, food and toys – and then leave. But these material things are not what the children we worked with truly yearned for. As they started trusting us, the children opened up. They told us what they truly wanted and needed: time. But the volunteers weren’t spending time with the children because of the stigma and fear surrounding HIV.

When we fail to treat people of any age, including children, as equals in society, we make them invisible. This is why we focus on equality and engagement as core tenets of education at Dream a Dream. You cannot learn anything without being seen, without being respected and without being engaged.

When you treat young people with dignity, inclusion and equity, you unlock deep potential in them. Recognising their past without making it define their present or future gives dignity to their experiences. It enables them to be seen and heard as equals – regardless of their material standing in society. And it builds empathy. It builds conditions where all people can live with dignity. It helps an entire society to create and sustain a thriving culture. And this starts with our youth.

The young people who benefit from our programmes don’t abandon their communities. They stay connected and show up through the challenging times, whether from floods, poverty or disease.

When poverty and hardship is everywhere, you can become blind to it. Within a few weeks of moving to Mumbai, I blanked out the people living in squalor as I travelled around the city. People debate whether to give money to the children begging at traffic lights. Whatever choice you make, look them in the eye. Acknowledge them. See them.

The realisation of the importance of seeing took us into the education ecosystem with a sharp focus. We wanted to tap into the creativity and empathy of teachers who, throughout their careers, have a direct impact on the lives of thousands of children. When teachers bring empathy and creativity into the classroom, they become role models who help children develop compassionate and resilient life skills.

The basic beliefs that drove us to found Dream a Dream are simple. First, that children growing up in adversity best develop life skills through play and art. Second, that we need to create positive transformative experiences to counteract traumatic ones. All of us have these from childhood that have had a deep impact on us. Think about yours now - you should feel a body memory, so that even now, you might get goosebumps, shivers or a churning in your stomach. Caring, compassionate adults create the safe environments essential for positive transformative experiences.

With over 114 million young people growing up in poverty in India, and 33% of children under the age of five experiencing developmental problems, we partnered with the Delhi government to put the wellbeing of children at the heart of the education system. Forty mentor teachers became its architects. They brought transformational experiences from their families, schools and communities. The new curriculum was based on the songs, games and stories of their childhoods. And we took this curriculum out to 800,000 children across thousands of schools in Delhi.

Porticus was our first institutional funder in 2016. This was transformative and helped us to reach out to the wider ecosystem: the media, the government, employers.

Our wellbeing tools for adolescents are now administered by four state governments and impact hundreds of thousands of young people in India. People like Prasanna:

“When I was a child, I dreamed of the day I could stand up to my abusive father and retaliate when he beat my mother and brother. Today, as an adult, I have the strength to stand up to him without violence and without anger. I have empathy in the realisation that he never had any of the support that I have had.”

We began working with Prasanna as a ten-year-old. His father was a violent alcoholic, his family lived in extreme poverty and he had been excluded from school for aggression. He joined our field hockey programme and learnt to channel his anger and emotions into the sport. Within six months he was the best and most committed hockey player in the team.

Two years later he disappeared. We only knew his neighbourhood, not a specific address. One Sunday, after hours of searching, we found him. Prasanna could not believe that someone cared enough to come looking. We learned that his father had beaten up his mother and brother so badly that he had been forced to find work to support them. He had just accepted that reality. But when he saw us, something in him fundamentally shifted. He made a commitment to himself that he would finish school and college.

He is now 28 years old, married with a child of his own, and working as a communications specialist, photographer and filmmaker. He has also joined Dream a Dream as a life skills facilitator.

With the support of people like Prasanna, we continue to work, using play and art, with over 10,000 children every year in Bangalore through after-school programmes. We cannot parachute in as experts with children or teachers. We need to listen and understand each new generation coming into our programmes.

Thirty years from now, what kind of world do we wish to see? For me, as for Porticus, the answer is a society based on tenets of kindness, joy, empathy and connection. To achieve this, we need to ensure that nobody is invisible. Only then can we all enjoy dignified lives.