LABHYA FOUNDATION

Richa is an educator and social entrepreneur. She is the co-founder of Labhya Foundation, an India-based non-profit making Social Emotional Learning (SEL) accessible to children from low socio-economic and vulnerable backgrounds. Richa’s passion for education stemmed out of her lived experience as a child and her extensive work with children from refugee, migrant and other at-risk communities. Richa is a Girls20 Ambassador and has been awarded the Entrepreneur of the Year 2019 award by the Takeda Foundation.

Richa’s role as the co-founder at Labhya involves leading teams to develop SEL-based curriculum, teacher training and evaluation at scale and in partnership with governments. Labhya currently impacts over 2 million children in India.

Richa’s experience has driven her to bring system-level reforms in the public education system of India. For over 6 years, she has worked with education non-profits like Teach For India and Teach For All.

Children from low socio-economic backgrounds are unable to cope with the ill-effects of poverty. In India itself, over 200 Million children come from such backgrounds and are negatively impacted by the stress that accompanies poverty. As a result, these children experience reduced attentiveness, lack of curiosity, demotivation, powerlessness, shame and anger. 

To solve this, my non-profit, Labhya Foundation equips such children with social and emotional skills. We partner with state governments to design and ensure effective implementation of a daily class in all government-run schools of the state, where children practice skills like emotion regulation and relationship building. We support the government through SEL curriculum, teacher capacity building and evaluation. 

Today, we equip 2 Million+ children in 20,000+ schools with skills that help them cope with their adverse realities. We believe that the most vulnerable children today, if given the right skills, can become lifelong learners and elevate humanity.

Children from low socio-economic and vulnerable backgrounds are unable to cope with the ill-effects of poverty. All over the world, roughly 663 million children live in poverty and are disproportionately impacted by the stress that accompanies it. As a result, these children often experience reduced attentiveness, lack of curiosity, demotivation, powerlessness, shame and anger.

Unfortunately, public education systems across developing countries lack the area expertise and structures to equip these children with the necessary skills to tackle these challenges, cope with their reality and go on to become productive and healthy citizens of the world. In India itself, over 300 Million children experience poverty. Most of these children are enrolled in public education systems, which has not prioritised children’s needs & has focussed mainly on academic learning. While these schools ensure free education and meals, children do not learn how to cope with their harsh realities. 

There is an alarming gap between the skills our most vulnerable children need and the skills that government-run schools currently provide. As a result, millions of children drop out of school, resort to violence, suffer from mental health issues and become unproductive citizens.

Labhya Foundation equips children from low socio-economic backgrounds with the necessary skills to cope with the ill-effects of poverty and become lifelong learners.

To fulfil this, Labhya Foundation co-creates Social and Emotional Learning programs in partnership with governments, at scale. We partner with governments to design and implement a daily class in all government-run schools of the state, where children learn and practice social and emotional skills like relationship building, action-orientation and emotion control. 

Labhya supports partner governments in three ways- SEL curriculum, teacher capacity building and evaluation. Our team of experts works alongside government officials to leverage the existing infrastructure in the state’s public education system to sustainably deliver the SEL program at scale.

Our curriculum includes reflective stories, mindfulness, interactive activities and ways to express oneself. The curriculum created is contextual to vulnerable children’s needs. 

Additionally, we enable teachers to create emotionally safe spaces in classrooms, to deliver mindfulness sessions and to ensure active participation of all students. 

Lastly, we support the government in setting up robust monitoring and evaluation processes to ensure effective delivery of the class. 

In the past 3 years, our programs have significantly reduced behavioural challenges among students and positively shifted student-teacher relationships.

Labhya Foundation serves children from low socio-economic and vulnerable backgrounds. Most of these children are enrolled in government-run schools and come from families with a household income of $1 or less, a day. Additionally, these children grow up experiencing various ill-effects of poverty, which lead to reduced attentiveness, lack of curiosity, demotivation, powerlessness, shame and anger. My experience of working with children from at-risk communities over the past 6 years has helped me identify the urgent need of social and emotional skills among these children.

Labhya’s programs address children’s needs in two ways. Firstly, we co-create the entire SEL program in collaboration with children, teachers and existing officials in the partner state’s education system. Learning from their experience results in a highly contextual program for children. In fact, we pilot the curriculum with a small number of children in schools, before rolling it out to all government-run schools of the state.

Secondly, based on our rigorous need-analysis surveys and experience of working with children, we design programs in a way that there is no burden on children. Conventional structures like homework, notebooks and assessments have been removed from the program and emphasis has been given to participation, reflection and expression.

Labhya aims to elevate opportunities for vulnerable children, who are traditionally left behind. Currently, children from low socio-economic backgrounds don’t have the skills to cope with the ill-effects of poverty. This stops them from getting on the path to becoming lifelong learners and productive citizens.

Through my non-profit, we equip these children with social and emotional skills. We work in partnership with governments to co-create Social Emotional Learning programs at scale. 

The children we serve make more than half of the world’s young population. We believe that scalable programs that help children cope with their harsh realities can elevate humanity.

At age 17, I started working on-ground with Rohingya refugees, the world’s most persecuted minority. I collaborated with UNHCR and local organisations to rehabilitate them towards a better future. Here, I was moved by the repeated experiences of how each child’s perspective and potential was defined by their inability to cope with trauma, environmental & emotional adversities.

To explore this further, I spent the next 4 years teaching in under-resourced government schools across India. I began by volunteering as a performing arts teacher. I, then, worked in a low-income government-run school as a Teach For India fellow. Being a part of one of the largest education systems in the world gave me a holistic understanding of how education is not limited to what happens in a classroom. As a TFI fellow, I piloted various projects around social emotional learning (SEL) with my students and extensively researched about SEL in the global education landscape. 

These experiences made me realise my purpose and thus at age 21, I co-founded Labhya Foundation, to enable children from low socio-economic backgrounds with social-emotional skills to help them cope with the adverse effects of poverty.

As a late-born only child, I spent my childhood learning to be responsible, regulated and to always be prepared to take care of my father, who has a chronic neurological disorder and my mother, who has struggled with her mental health for years. Although I grew up in a positive home environment, my instincts were very different from other children my age. I was more careful and fearful compared to my friends, who were carefree and risk-taking. 

At age 6, a financial crisis turned our lives upside down. I changed schools and felt isolated and humiliated. At age 10, we shifted from Zambia to India in hope of a better future, but I was never unable to fully understand how this experience negatively shaped my mindset.

As an educator, I have witnessed my students struggling to fulfil basic expectations. Over 6 years, I have lost children to helplessness, inability to cope with problems and poor decisions. Or as most of us would see it- poverty, suicide, and crime. 

Working with vulnerable children made me realise how they were developing the same instincts as I did. I was able to identify the gap in their education and thus found my purpose.

Over the past few years, I have been able to cultivate a multitude of skills as an educator, entrepreneur and systems change agent, that uniquely position me to continuously deliver programs through my non-profit, Labhya Foundation. Through my work with governments, vulnerable children and communities over the past few years, I have developed skills like curriculum design, program evaluation, stakeholder management and training facilitation. Additionally, I trained in child development, teaching, and program design as a Teach For India fellow.

My background of working with Rohingya refugee children, the world’s most persecuted minority, among other vulnerable children, shaped my perspective as an educationist. Multiple such experiences over the past 6 years have helped me recognise a large-scale systemic need for social and emotional learning, especially for children enrolled in public education systems.

My experience stems from being a part of prestigious communities of leaders through organisations like Teach For India, Teach For All, Girls20, Women’s Forum, the US State Department and French Development Agency. My aim is to collaborate with leaders from these communities and networks to scale my project into developing countries across the world.

Introducing an intangible concept like Social Emotional Learning (SEL) to India’s education system has been an extremely challenging journey. These challenges majorly revolved around the rigid mindset around education and lack of support. 

I truly understood the rigidity of the education system when I got rejected by multiple schools to pilot our program, which was free-of-cost and volunteer-driven. However, schools asked us to conduct “art and craft” sessions instead, as our program didn't have physical outputs.

Further, there was no mentorship or financial support for my intervention. SEL was a new concept that funders were not prepared to invest in and unsure how to support. 

Over the course of one year, I got rejected by 79 schools before piloting my program in 3 schools using the stipend from my fellowship. Despite these barriers, I chose to keep learning from every session and continued to build the idea of capacity building within governments around SEL. 

Finally, in 2018, I pitched our learnings to the Delhi Government to co-create the world’s first & largest SEL intervention, ‘Happiness Curriculum’, at just 1 year old. We were selected out of 1800+ proposals. Labhya has since paved the way for SEL in India.

I recognised my leadership potential when I was a teacher to 150 children in a government-run school for 2 years, as a Teach For India fellow.

My students were from one of the most violent communities of Delhi. On my first day, I saw bright first-generation learners struggling to sit in class and learn. In the first 3 months, I lost 2 of my students. One, to a curable disease and another, to communal violence.

I decided to visit students’ homes to understand their context. I was able to recognize three urgent needs of my students. First, the classroom needed to become a safe space for every child. Second, students needed to understand themselves and take charge of their lives. Third, proper nutrition had to be ensured for all children.

Over the next two years, I co-created and implemented community-based projects with my students and collaborated with stakeholders like parents, school staff and local authorities.

As a result, violence decreased while attendance and academic performance increased. One of our projects was adopted by the government. Most importantly, my students demonstrated leadership skills. 

As my students came closer to understanding their true potential, they shaped my perspective as a leader.

Labhya Foundation’s core innovation is integrating a unique concept like Social Emotional Learning within public education systems across developing countries. I first recognised the opportunity to build expertise around SEL within governments when I was volunteering in a government-run school as an undergraduate student. 

At the school level, teachers needed the skills and dedicated time to holistically support children. However, they were being incapacitated to effectively complete coursework in an endeavour to increase the overall academic performance. 

At the policy level, education officials had recognised that children in public education systems struggled with basic skills of attentiveness, curiosity and motivation. This was clearly seen in the form of frequent violent episodes, drop-out rates and overall school environments. However, the largely academic inclination of the system and lack of understanding of the root cause of this behaviour was a barrier to combat this issue. 

While working in the public education systems at various levels, I was able to identify that it was important to leverage existing teaching resources, training structures and monitoring processes to bring the systems’ focus to Social and Emotional Learning. Further, dedicated time needs to be devoted to SEL so teachers can create emotionally safe spaces for children regularly. 

Therefore, at the systemic level, Labhya incapacitates a group of government stakeholders (Master Trainers) to become experts on SEL and co-creates curriculum with them. Further, through policy changes and budgetary allocations, we ensure that this contextual curriculum is delivered by school teachers through a daily compulsory SEL class.

My project, Labhya Foundation’s Theory of Change has been designed with our stakeholders, with an aim to impact the most vulnerable children across developing countries. Please refer to the comprehensive models attached to get an overview of:

• Theory of change of our program: We partner with governments to facilitate a daily SEL class. Hence, children are able to effectively cope with the ill-effects of poverty,  become lifelong learners and go on to become productive, healthy global citizens.

• Theory of change for research and advocacy: The primary focus is to advocate for SEL to become a global education priority & an integral part of SDGs 1 and 4.

To support our hypothesis, we have collected preliminary data & testimonials, which indicate that our programs are successfully being delivered on the ground and that students are moving towards our intended outcomes. Till date, we have partnered with 2 state governments to deliver a daily SEL program that reaches over 2 Million children from vulnerable backgrounds through 110,000 trained teachers. Additionally, 70% of school teachers see a positive behavioural shift in students. Most parent & student testimonials also echo the same. 

Further, there are many studies conducted across the globe that provide evidence that SEL programs lead to increased academic performance and overall wellbeing in children. Moreover, studies show SEL programs add a multiplier of 11 times to the overall economic return through children becoming life-long learners and productive citizens of the world.

My project, Labhya Foundation, is currently serving 2 million children between the ages of 5 to 15. These children are enrolled in government schools of 2 Indian states across a total of 20,000 schools. Additionally, we have trained about 110,000 teachers in these 20,000 schools to effectively deliver our program. 

In one year, Labhya aims to serve 3 Million children by partnering with another state government in India. 

In five years, Labhya aims to serve 10 Million children from low socio-economic backgrounds across the world, by partnering with governments and creating scalable SEL programs for public education systems.

Through my project, my goal is to enable governments in developing countries with the area expertise and governance structures to design and implement scalable programs on Social and Emotional Learning for children from low socio-economic backgrounds. This will enable public education systems across developing countries to be reimagined and become truly child-centric.

My impact goal for the next one year is to serve 3 million children. Further, my non-profit will ensure that each child who is impacted by us demonstrates high levels of learning interest, optimism, action-orientation and emotion control. Hence, we will incapacitate our government partners in conducting periodic evaluations of SEL skills among these children and ensure consistent growth of each child. Such an evaluation will be first of its kind in the developing world. 

In the next five years, my impact goal is to serve 10 Million children and bring the issue of SEL for children from low socio-economic backgrounds and child-centric education to the forefront of policy-making across 4 countries and all major international policy forums through consistent impact evaluation and advocacy. Additionally, children impacted by our programs currently will begin to demonstrate high levels of critical thinking, perseverance, reflection and empathy, thus getting on a path to lifelong learning. Furthermore, Labhya will create well-structured metrics to measure SEL which will be incorporated in the international SDG indicator measurement process.

We have identified three barriers that may limit our impact in the next year and the next 5 years. These barriers are related to fundraising, the COVID-19 pandemic and the rigidity of government systems. 

Firstly, Social Emotional Learning is an upcoming concept in education across developing countries. While our work is spearheading the space, it is a challenge to invest Indian funders in such a new concept whose impact is long-term and based on behaviour-change at a systemic level. Additionally, a lot of bias against young female entrepreneurs exists among funder communities, which has been a barrier as well. 

Secondly, COVID-19 pandemic has negatively affected public education systems across developing countries. As most countries are under government-mandated lockdown, children enrolled in these systems are not in touch with schools at all and have limited to no access to teachers. Governments do not have the resources and expertise to facilitate tech-enabled learning for such a large number of children. Therefore, if not contained in time, the effects of COVID-19 on public education systems might hamper our scale-up strategy. 

Thirdly, the importance of literacy & numeracy is deeply ingrained in the minds of government school teachers, school leaders, education officers & bureaucrats. As we work with diverse government systems, it will be a challenge to consistently make the government see the need for Social and Emotional Learning and therefore invest resources in it.

We plan to address the above mentioned potential barriers in three concrete ways. We will leverage our networks, design offline tech-enabled programs and produce large-scale impact data in order to overcome these barriers.

Firstly, we are approaching international funders, philanthropists and institutional funder agencies who are giving generously to organisations working on systemic change and on Social Emotional Learning. Increasing our funder landscape to more progressive funders, such as Elevate, will support us in growing as per our vision.

Secondly, we have piloted a few tech-enabled programs with our existing partner governments to combat the inaccessibility to education among children enrolled in public education systems. We have successfully completed some of these pilots and will be able to effectively implement our programs at scale to other states as well.

Finally, we aim to combat the sole inclination towards numeracy/literacy and scepticism towards SEL by measuring the impact of our programs at scale and producing reliable, student-level large-scale data. This will build a strong case for SEL in front of governments and government stakeholders. Further, we will also partner with intergovernmental organisations and leverage their existing government partnerships to reach our impact goals.

In conclusion, planning and working towards these solutions will support us in growing at our desired pace and reach more children across the globe.

We currently work in partnership with 2 state governments of India, namely the Government of Delhi & Uttarakhand. We sign multi-year MoUs with essential government education bodies like the State Council of Education, Research and Training and the Department of Education of the state in order to design and run our programs.

Our Public-Private-Partnership model has three major aspects. Firstly, our MoUs are non-monetary. This enables us to act as stakeholders and maintain our autonomy. Secondly, our programs are fully co-created and implemented using existing government resources and infrastructure. Thirdly, our programs are implemented at scale, with the help of  large-scale budget provisions being made by the partner government. This enables us to create policy-level sustainable changes in public education systems.

Through our interventions, we are trying to impact children who come from the bottom of the pyramid across developing countries. Our beneficiaries are considered the most vulnerable and excluded across the globe. In India alone, 236 million children attending government-run schools come from families with a household income of $1 or less a day.

We as an organisation cannot be fully self-sustainable because we are reaching the most vulnerable and excluded. Hence, we have designed our model to be impactful and cost-effective by leveraging existing government resources and infrastructure to design and ensure implementation.

Our intervention operates as a three-way, public-private partnership (PPP), where we co-create sustainable SEL interventions that are backed by policymaking and large scale provision of budget by state governments. To act as equal stakeholders, maintain our autonomy and avoid conflict of interest, we provide support at no financial cost to the government and raise funds through foundations and philanthropists.

As a result, our partner state governments have allocated $100 million (~5% of their respective education budgets) each year for our interventions. This has made our approach innovative and sustainable. As a result, we have been able to create a lean & nimble non-profit model, as the annual investment needed per child is typically less than $1 USD because we leverage government resources and infrastructure.

I plan to bring in money for Labhya Foundation through sustained donations and grants. I believe that this is the most feasible and strategic way to make Labhya financially sustainable, given our program structure, the scale of our operations and our commitment to provide our services free of cost. 

In the short term, we have been able to raise funds from philanthropists, grant competitions and some Indian grantmaking institutions. At an early stage, we have raised around 50,000 USD from India, which is the most unrestricted fund SEL has received here. Over time, we have realised that our potential funders and supporters are in countries like the USA, as SEL is a familiar concept there.

Therefore, for the long term, we have scoped over 500 potential funders, philanthropists and funding institutions in the USA and UK whose portfolios are in alignment with our work. With the help of The Elevate Prize, we will be able to tap into many of these institutions and networks to raise sustained donations in order to substantially grow.

We are a not-for-profit organisation based in India. We have raised a total of USD ~ 43.6k or INR 3.27 million in grants from the following:

• USD 13.1k (INR 985,240) Philanthropists
• USD 9.3k (1 Million Yen / INR 699,675) by Takeda Foundation; Richa was chosen as the Best Entrepreneur of 2019 across 350 applications from 70 countries
• USD 6.6k (INR 500,000) Drishti Human Resource Centre; an incubator that supports through small grants
• USD 5.3k (INR 399,250) Breakthrough Trust India; an 18-year old organisation working against gender-based discrimination and violence
• USD 6.1k (INR 454,600) OM Foundation School; a 20-year old organisation working for providing quality education from underserved communities
• USD 1.6k (INR 120,000) Pravah; a 25-year old organisation running a flagship incubation program to only support 10 Indian organisations a year
• USD 250 (INR 18,750) Peace First; a 20-year old organisation supporting young changemakers fighting against social injustices by providing mini-grants
• USD 1.3k (1k GBP / INR 94,725) by The Commonwealth; Labhya’s co-founder (Vedant) was chosen as the Asia Winner of Commonwealth Youth Award 2020 and was awarded by Patricia Scotland (Commonwealth Secretary-General)

*Assuming USD 1= INR 75

We are currently a team of 5 fulltime people and 3 part-time consultants. By 2022, we want to impact 5 million+ children & 300,000+ teachers by partnering with 4 state governments. In order to achieve that, we will need a team of 20 people. We estimate that we will have to raise USD 750k in grants by 2022 to achieve our impact. The majority of the funds will be towards an external impact evaluation while growing our team steadily.

Furthermore, to effectively work towards our impact goal and scaling we have started identifying grantmakers who align with our goals. Through our research, we have come to learn that a larger number of funders who would be able to understand and support our work are mainly based in the USA. We have researched & scoped 500+ foundations, family funds and contributors. We have identified 60+ who have clear alignment with our work which are based in the USA. We have gone further in our research to find their total funding size, average ticket size, past organisations funded and why each of these partners sits in alignment with us.

Our estimated expenses for 2020 would be around USD 150-200k to accelerate our operations across India and developing countries. A percentage-wise break up of our projected expenses are as follows:

• Curriculum & Training: 28.7%
• Government Partnership Management: 2.0%
• Advocacy: 5.9%
• Monitoring & Evaluation: 9.8%
• Research & Innovation: 7.9%
• Technology: 11.8%
• State Level Operations: 3.9%
• District Level Operations: 9.6%
• Fundraising: 7.9%
• Team Capacity Building Fund: 4.1%
• Team Mental Health Fund: 1.0%
• Legal Expenses: 1.6%
•  Human Resource: 5.9%

As a young female social entrepreneur working on systemic change, it has been challenging to take up space. Further, my work in Social and Emotional Learning is very new to Indian governments and funders. This has led to a tougher journey for me than other non-profit leaders in my country. Over time, Labhya has received more support internationally and we, therefore, believe that the Elevate Prize will enable us to overcome the challenges that may hamper our growth.

Firstly, The Elevate Prize amount will help us overcome our funding barrier. It will support Labhya in expanding our team rapidly scaling to more states and other developing countries.

Secondly, The Elevate Prize perfectly aligns with Labhya’s organisational needs during this time of crisis. The next two years are the most pivotal years in Labhya’s journey where we plan to accelerate our growth multifold by expanding to different parts of the world and create large-scale evidence in support of SEL across developing countries. The mentorship and networks provided by Elevate will truly support us in achieving this, as we will learn to navigate through the various challenges we are facing due to COVID19 currently.

Lastly, The Elevate Prize will support us in communicating Labhya’s mission to make it compelling for potential governments across the world. Gaining dedicated support in marketing, promoting and communicating our mission will help us amplify our work and seek partner governments effectively.

Funding and revenue model: We currently impact 2 million children and are at a tipping point as an organisation. We need funders who understand our work and align with the pace of our growth.

Mentorship and/or coaching: We seek mentorship to effectively grow our team and create an effective organizational culture rooted with compassion. Further, we need support in planning to effectively scale across developing countries.

Monitoring and evaluation: To effectively amplify our work, we want to conduct an impact evaluation through a credible research institute. This study will enable us to reiterate, analyse and get more credibility to our work. As a result, we believe we will be able to raise grants to effectively meet our impact goals.

Marketing, media, and exposure: Gaining dedicated support in marketing, promoting and communicating our mission will help us amplify our work and seek partner governments effectively.

In the next 5 years, we would like to partner with governments and intergovernmental organisations to expand our operations across developing countries and impact 10 Million children. Additionally, we would like to partner with funding organisations and research institutes to facilitate large-scale research on SEL for vulnerable children in developing countries. 

With the help of The Elevate Prize’s prestigious network, we would like to partner with governments and intergovernmental organisations in developing countries of Asia and Africa to take our project beyond the public education systems of India. Some of our target countries are Malaysia, Vietnam, Nigeria and Zambia. 

Additionally, we would like to be introduced to funding organisations like NoVo Foundation, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation and Peery Foundation to sustainably support our organisation’s growth across the globe. Lastly, we would like to partner with research organisations like PEAR institute to design and publish large-scale research on Social Emotional Learning worldwide.