Enabling Leadership

Neha believes education is the most powerful tool to create change in the world. It’s stories of and from children that inspire her to develop and engage all types of social mindsets through her work. She’s been an active leader in the education movement for over a decade. An experienced social entrepreneur specialized in fundraising, brand building, and organizational development, she’s cumulatively raised 5 million USD, built brand following, and led organizations impacting 500,000 children across India, Cambodia, Japan, Kuwait & USA. Post her Teach For India fellowship, she co-founded Just For Kicks, a nonprofit developing life skills for children in low-income schools using football, then spearheaded an IIT Bombay Edtech startup to impart life skills through Computer Science. In 2018, she merged Just For Kicks with 2 nonprofits. Today, Neha leads Enabling Leadership to develop life skills through football, music & LEGO, impacting 6300 children across 185 schools.

Today's global crises and the failure of global leadership has led to the need for a NEW Way of Thinking, Set of Skills and Definition of Leader. We enable children to become leaders through football (Just For Kicks), music (Music Basti) & LEGO (Build Maya) programs, developing essential life skills, as recognized by the UN SDG #4. Our leaders will go on to become responsible and employable adults driving change to solve 21st century problems at school, home and in communities.

We believe every child can be a leader - positive contributor, role model, global citizen. Our leadership framework underpins each program - Strong Belief Systems, Excellent Problem Solving Skills and Keen Sense of Awareness & Responsibility.

Our programs for 8-16-year-olds from government and low-income private schools are 6 year interventions enabling children to collaborate, reflect and connect first-hand experiences from the sessions with their real lives. 

Over 110 million out of a total of 250 million children in India are enrolled in government schools, where they don't get the opportunity to develop essential skills and qualities like problem solving, collaboration & communication, values & principles. This critical gap, wherein these children are not equipped to become responsible and employable citizens is leading to a continuing crisis in our society. United Nations recognizes this crisis in the form of needing to develop ‘global citizenship skills’ under Sustainable Development Goal #4 of providing inclusive and equitable quality education.

The current scenario of unemployment and uncertainty about the future is leading to various forms of physical, mental and emotional stress for these children and their families. As a result, it becomes even more essential for children to develop life skills such as courage, self-belief, resilience, resourcefulness, problem-solving, health and hygiene, managing emotions, cooperation and collaboration to deal with the crisis effectively. 

In the ‘new normal’, schools will reopen, education will continue and we will strive even harder to provide children from low-income schools a more holistic education. Thus, the need for a leadership and life skills program like ours is even more amplified now, than ever before!

Our experiential pedagogy caters to 8 -16 year olds through a 6 year intervention. Each year includes 48  60-90 minute sessions conducted twice a week by trained facilitators for each batch (1 facilitator: 20 children - 2 football teams / 1 Music Band/ 1 LEGO Group). We use active learning (journaling and reflections) for every session, equipping children to relate experiences and learnings from the classroom/ playground with their real lives. Each program has events (football leagues/ music concerts/ LEGO showcases), which integrate learning and motivate children. We provide children with equipment, and conduct assessments involving life skills and technical skills. We plan the year with governments and engage with school staff, parents through investment sessions. 

JFK enables children to work together as teams to learn life skills and football techniques through sessions and league matches. MB enables children to tell stories of their dreams through music with a combination of musical training, song writing, culminating in public concerts. BM (concept of play) enables children to re-imagine their communities and their future using LEGO. Children are trained in design fundamentals to create prototype models by being part of design challenges and presentations while developing essential life skills and showcasing them. 

We work with children attending government/ low-income private schools. Parents of the children in our programs are minimum wage earners.

All programs create sustainable and systemic impact on the educational ecosystem in each community, in addition to the direct impact on the lives of children. Building relationships with parents, school authorities, communities and local governments is an essential part of our program structure. This ensures that girls are not prevented from enrolling in our programs because of social stigma about girls playing/ singing/ solving problems. Various activities are included to engage with all stakeholders - orientation sessions, investment sessions, home-visits. Our programmatic events (leagues, concerts, showcases) are platforms that engage the children's communities. By giving each team/ band/ group a name and logo, we create a sense of belonging and excitement. All stakeholders get an opportunity to see their children demonstrate their learnings first-hand and cheer them on. Youth and alumni from local areas are identified and trained as assistant facilitators, enabling local leadership, up-skilling, and employment. Our programs also break gender stereotypes and promote gender mainstreaming through a co-education group-learning model. Female facilitators inspire children and help community members see a future for their girls in our programs.

We are also elevating issues and their projects by building awareness and driving action to solve the most difficult problems of our world.

We are changing the education system in developing countries (India, Cambodia) and creating innovative replicable, scalable programs for life skill development that can be used for all children irrespective of socio-economic background, gender, race, class. We focus on the bottom of the economic pyramid to serve those who need it the most with minimum access to education and opportunities to succeed socially and professionally. We strive to level the playing field - educational equity and gender equity.

In 2011, Vikas and I were working as teachers with young, impressionable children in government schools in Mumbai and Pune. We felt accountable towards our role as educators and the need to educate in a way that let our children have fun while doing something they love. I was confident that learning would continue to co-exist with this. 

Many of us didn't get a chance to enjoy life skill development through co-curricular education in our Indian school lives. That’s why we came back to change systems in schools that needed the most support. That was the inception of Just For Kicks. As an educator, I envisioned a world where all children played freely and had fun, while developing life skills, values, leadership and awareness of themselves and the world.

I chose football as it was close to my heart and I knew how to go about it. None of the organizations working in life skills and sports were functioning inside the under-resourced school system. So we coined our own model.

In 2018, we merged with 2 more nonprofits into Enabling Leadership, with the goal of reaching one million children across the world using football, music and LEGO by 2030. 

My passion and determination to transform education systems and social mindsets led me to teach at the 2 year TFI fellowship, leaving me energized to develop life skills through global, innovative education systems.

Sport and music have been an integral part of my life since childhood, giving me opportunities and teaching me life lessons. As a teacher, I probably knew how to coach children football even better than teaching them classroom subjects. I used it to my advantage and built a team that was driven to use football as the transformational learning vehicle. I was driven by an ambition to make our children more adept at skills that’ll lead them through life successfully. With a deep belief in the power of sport, I turned to football as a vehicle to get me to that goal.

Gender inclusivity has been another passionate focus. JFK gave me the chance to level the playing field - equal number of girls and boys, and envision our girls making on the Indian Women’s Football team. I've pursued this passion with courage. 

Merging into Enabling Leadership, gave me the chance to merge my passion for sport, music, education, and my experience with LEGO and computer science. 

Early on in my career, I led development projects ranging from HIV/AIDs prevention, care and social protection in Mumbai, to mental health research and educational outreach in New York Public Schools. I have a BSc Honors in Applied Psychology, from New York University, where I was also awarded for academic excellence and leadership. I received the Duke of Edinburgh Bronze Award, became a United World Colleges Scholar, and co-authored journal publications in educational psychology. 

At the end of my teaching for leadership stint at TFI, I joined an IIT Bombay EdTech startup where I built the team and spearheaded product development and operations to impart life skills through computer science to children across rural and urban India, Japan, Kuwait and USA. I went on to work on projects with the Scratch Programming team, and collaborated with Google Apps for Education. This coincided with the world’s shift to 21st century skills and I co-founded ‘Just For Kicks’, a nonprofit for children from low-income schools across India to develop life skills using football in 2011. After 6 years, I merged Just For Kicks with 2 nonprofits into one global organization to develop leadership and life skills through football, music and LEGO, currently impacting 6,300 children across 185 schools in India and Cambodia. Over the past 12 years, I’ve strived to create change in the mindsets and actions of governments, funders, corporates, grantors, public private partners, HNIs, vendors, schools, parents, facilitators and children. 

We’ve faced many roadblocks in our journey from 7 school partners to 185, be it a cash flow crunch or extenuating external circumstances like a change of government. Through each of these phases, I’ve expertly navigated the chaos by continuously re-inventing and encouraging each one of our team members to think on their feet and arrive at creative solutions. I championed a unique fundraising initiative in 2015 during our biggest financial downturn, called ‘own your team’, which fueled the masses to contribute to a specific group of children. With this out-of-the-box thinking, I raised $50,000 which set the platform for raising more than $300,000 through this source. I’m now regularly raising millions for our programs.

When we rolled out our first Just For Kicks batch in 2011, there was extreme resistance to girls being beneficiaries to the extent that almost 95% of our cohort was boys. But I was crystal clear that I would continue to aspire to enroll more girls in the program irrespective of the resistance we might face. I pursued my goal of getting more girls to play to make the program a gender inclusive one, with passion and courage, often walking into communities to convince parents to send their girl children to the program. I championed parent awareness drives, partnerships with women’s sports groups, and on-boarded women ambassadors in an effort to increase the rate of enrollment of girls in our programs. Today, even at a scale of 6300 children, 50% are girls.

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We use creative mediums to build innovative programs and insert these programs in schools alongside mainstream academic subjects to develop life skills in order to transform education systems - change the what, why and how.

Our leadership framework underpins our programs and is developed on 3 traits which break down into life skills and associated learning outcomes:

1. Strong Belief Systems

• Belief in Self
• Belief in Others
• Belief in Principles & Values

2. Excellent Problem Solving Skills

• Creative Thinking
• Critical Thinking
• Bias to Action

3. Keen Sense of Awareness and Responsibility

• For Self
• For Community
• For the World

Every session involves journaling (also incorporated for the entire organization). In JFK, children play in specially curated regional leagues and a unique kind National Championship, where winners from all rural and urban sites gather to experience life outside their communities. Our music and LEGO children also attend this event where they meet other children and perform, thus making it a great opportunity for exposure and learning for everyone. 

MB offers a song writing opportunity for all children and lets them make DIY instruments. Some bands also create an instrument based ensemble. BM is developed around the concept of play and human centered design thinking for each child to creatively solve local-global problems. 

We've been using applications to monitor student, facilitator and program staff data on a per session basis and evaluate our impact. We're now creating our application to track, analyze and evaluate data for program development, student impact and organizational growth. 

Today’s complex and enormous global crises including poverty, gender inequity, climate insecurity, conflict and war, and unemployment, cannot be solved by individuals or single organizations. The failure of global leadership to address these has further worsened matters, and raised the urgent need for a new definition of leadership — one where every child must be a leader.

Crucial to this new definition are both, teaching a new way of thinking, as well as, a new set of 21st century skills. We need a generation of leaders who have strong belief systems and are principled and caring, as well as, are able to think critically, take creative risks and solve problems. These leaders understand the interconnected nature of our world, and therefore, the unprecedented need for sharing and collaboration today.

There has been a global shift towards recognizing this new definition of leadership. Some notable recent ones include the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals #4, which recognizes the need for education systems to equip learners with competencies such as problem solving, collaboration, critical thinking and communication; the international framework by Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) which outlines leadership and responsibility as essential career and life-skills; and the World Economic Forum, which in 2015, highlighted a set of crucial proficiencies and character qualities for education, including leadership. Common across all these is the fundamental recognition that well-rounded education must include a foundational set of skills, competencies and qualities too, in addition to subject matter knowledge.

While investments in building skills that promote productivity, entrepreneurship and innovation are needed for all children, at Enabling Leadership we focus on delivering programs to children who have unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge that will prepare them to be leaders in the world of tomorrow. Our creative and innovative programs use music, football and LEGO, and intervene in low- income private and government schools with students for at least six years. Each creative and fun program is carefully designed to enable children to collaborate, reflect and connect first-hand experiences and learnings from the classroom or playground with their real lives. 

Current: 6,300 children (as of March 2020 but this might drop to 5,530 children due to COVID-19)

In 1 Year from now: 6,500-7,000 children

In 5 Years from now: ~250,000 children

1. Consolidate the Enabling Leadership model by 2021.

2. Replicate the Enabling Leadership model from 2021-2025 with governments and other private as well as public private partners in Asia and probably in Africa.

3. Advocate Policy Level Changes and Inclusion of a holistic life skill education model like Enabling Leadership in schools 2025 onwards in Asia, Africa and other places with similar trends. 

Our current barriers include: 

• Adequate funding - a lot of time and effort still goes into this year-on-year, so it takes away from as well as doesn't allow us accelerate our growth in terms of outreach, team size and program development
• The COVID-19 pandemic has got us to pause and reevaluate our strategy. It has definitely affected funding, team, program development and most importantly program implementation. We've had to pivot virtual programs. 

Our long-term barriers include:

• Figuring out the best fundraising strategy and model for sustainability
• Scaling our programs to reach as many children as possible and entering new, diverse geographies (countries, urban vs rural) by entering successful partnerships with governments

We are committed to overcoming these barriers and believe that the Elevate Prize can definitely help us reach our goals in these ways:

• Build a strong board and advisory board to guide and advise on the strategy of the organization, represent the brand in global networks for fundraising, recognition and awards, build top level government partnerships, and mentor the leadership team. We are already in the process of strengthening our board with a diverse group (education, business, finance, legal, nonprofit) of international people who can take us to the next level. 
• Receive advice on fundraising strategy and sustainability. Senior members from our large corporate donors are already helping us with this, but we hope for this to be actioned out in the best way possible. 
• Receive mentorship and coaching and/or expert guidance on key aspects like scaling, enhancing our programs and increasing our impact, lobbying with governments to create policy level changes. Senior members from our large corporate donors and other partners are already helping us with this but we would like to work with the best in each domain for longer durations to make our programs world class. 
• In order to propagate our brand and work, we're also making a plan to onboard brand ambassadors/ celebrities from different fields - music, sport, film, education etc. who can talk about and represent our brand, as well as run campaigns for us. This should give us exposure and media traction, thus increasing our overall presence, following and funding. 

Governments in all our sites for School partnerships, community involvement, resources (venues, other partners, equipment, human resource etc.) 

Schools (private, public-private, government) to enroll children in our programs (some PPP partners include iTeach, Akanksha Foundation, Teach For India, Salaam Bombay Foundation, Simple Education Foundation, Peepul School)

Universities for research and program development, and recruitment of facilitators and other staff and volunteers. 

Music Institutions and Vendors - Program development, teaching, other music opportunities and scholarships (Global Music Institute, True School of Music, One World College of Music, Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts and Communications etc.)

Football Institutions and Vendors - Program development, teaching, other football opportunities and scholarships (Crystal Palace FC, Mumbai City FC, Bengaluru FC, Chennaiyan FC, India On Track, La Liga, South United Football Club, FA, Street Football World, Girls in the Lead etc.)

LEGO Foundation (need to partner with them) and clubs 

Other Education Organizations, Networks & Partners for collaboration, research and recruitment - Teach For India, iTeach, Life Labs, Teach For All, HundrED, Leadership For Equity, Magic Bus, YUWA, Naz Foundation, Magic Bus Foundation, Oscar Foundation, Inner Space Counseling

Donors - Corporates (Credit Suisse, Axis Bank Foundation, JP Morgan, Larsen & Toubro Hydrocarbon Engineering, Sony Music,SKF, BookASmile, ASICS, Intralox etc.) and Individuals (HNIs and Ultra HNIs)

Grantors - Co Campaign, EMpower, Tata Trusts, Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives, Common Goal

Crowdfunding Platforms - Global Giving, Mighty Cause, Ketto, Milaap

As a nonprofit organization, we offer one or more of our programs which includes a service (training) and associated equipment to our beneficiaries (low-income schools) free of cost (or at minimal cost in some cases). We raise funds through different types of donors to be able to implement these programs. Our organization follows the B2B model as we connect directly with the schools to reach children.

As of today:

75% funds - CSR/ Corporate Donors

5-10% funds - Grants

20-25% funds - Individual Donors

Over the next 5 years, we want to work towards this model of sustainability:

30% - CSR/ Corporate Donors

30% - Grants

20% - Individual Donors

20% - Partners (Schools) and/or Government

We raise funds to implement our programs every year. We seek to raise 340,000 USD for the current financial and program year (April 2020 to March 2021). 

Our estimated expenses for 2020-21 (April to March cycle) are 870,000 USD. 

I want to continuously create value propositions and channelize my passion, energy and ambition towards meaningful opportunities for my beneficiaries. I’m determined to transform education systems, change social mindsets, and impact one million children by 2030. Building 2 nonprofits has been empowering and challenging. I see myself growing from hereon by proactively engaging with peers, mentors, collaborators, and critics with global mindsets, diverse skill sets and challenging as well as encouraging views. 

I’ve crossed Phase 1 of building the foundation – programs, people and partnerships and am entering Phase 2 of my vision to replicate the idea to impact more children globally. I’m also trying to make changes to the organization structure, build expansion plans and enter new countries. I want to advance my current capabilities and develop new skills, knowledge, competencies and perspectives to grow as a leader with strong values. This requires me to build a strong network that'll enable cross learning and connectivity, get more influential amongst people, gain knowledge and skills to apply to the real world, and gather resources and inspiration to innovate. 

I am applying for the Elevate Prize to be able to raise funds, welcome board members and advisors, learn and share with a network of diverse leaders, and get mentored to take Enabling Leadership to the scale and success I desire in order to create maximum impact. This opportunity will let me utilize my entrepreneurial acumen for public good, and enable me to drive futuristic sustainable impact for international education systems.