Slam Out Loud

SOL was founded in 2017 with the vision to empower children with a voice that enables them to change lives. The need for creative spaces to foster expression and mental well-being of children has become more crucial in light of the COVID pandemic. The Elevate Prize has the transformative potential to help us:

1) Scale-up current operations to achieve pan-India coverage and reach nearly 10 million more children in the next 3 years

2) Set up a Rapid Prototyping Lab that will allow us to design and test cost-effective innovations in content creation and dissemination.

3) Expand advocacy efforts in order to institutionalize arts based education and emphasis on socio-emotional learning in central and state governments, large foundations, and partner non-profits.

This funding will help us invest in recruitment, research and development, and program costs required for scale-up. We plan to use the mentorship provided by the prize to learn how to build resilient and adaptive systems for a rapidly growing organization. Finally, the amplification will help us effectively reach more thought leaders in the ecosystem and advocate for systems-level change.

Fostering voice has always been an integral means for youth to understand agency and thrive; which is visible in how youth’s art and expression is always on the front lines of movements that call attention to long-standing problems or seek to change the world.

I am committed, through SOL, to building a future where children, no matter where they come from, use expressive practices to build creativity, confidence, resolve conflicts, and think critically; challenging established narratives and offering imaginative alternatives. Towards this, we leverage creative learning through technology to create content that can be accessed by children across low-tech platforms like WhatsApp, IVRS, and mass media of radio and TV.

Working towards solving systemic challenges of educational equity, I have harnessed collective action and will make it our strongest pillar. In five years, I see SOL as a global non-profit that advocates for education systems that allow children to harness their true potential; through the support of individuals, institutions, and communities across the globe.

I envision a future that has reversed the global deprioritization of the arts; unlocking valuable social capital from the least represented communities, and children like the ones I work with, being the cultural curators of tomorrow.

Global research shows that creative expression is connected to all we say we want for our children and demand from our schools: academic-achievement, social-and-emotional learning (SEL), civic-engagement, and equitable opportunity. 

Yet the global deprioritization of the arts deprives our children of these life and SEL skills, and the experience of a quality holistic education. For disadvantaged children-it’s worse-a combination of this status quo and their circumstances (such as poverty, poor mental and physical health, etc.) results in their failure to thrive and have a voice.

Going by our public school data: Indian students receive < 20 hours of art education in a year, with a ratio of 1 art teacher : 1400 students. 

SOL is a non-profit that uses art forms like poetry, storytelling, theatre, and visual arts to enable children from disadvantaged communities to find their voice through creative expression. SOL places professional artists into classrooms, trains teachers, and creates e-learning products and assets to enable children aged 10-17 build Creative Confidence skills like creativity, critical thinking, and empathy. We work with children, institutions, and communities through:

Programmatic-engagement and long term impact: 56000 children across 4 Indian states

Zero-budget Art Resources, Light-Touch Impact: 4.7 million children across 19 countries

SOL believes in using arts as a vehicle to empower individuals from different socio-economic backgrounds. Unlike most art education spaces, we use arts as the means to an end, helping children build creative-confidence for thriving in the world.

We are context-sensitive and integrate technology to scale our work efficiently. SOL’s indigenous WhatsApp chatbot can be accessed with low-internet bandwidth and it automates the way children receive and engage with art lessons. It also enables SOL to track learning and feedback for each beneficiary. By incorporating the Internet of Things (IoT) we are using a combination of highly intuitive user interfaces, Natural Language Understanding, and Machine learning to automatically respond to certain queries, very similar to a Voice Response system when one calls a bank.

Our most recent curriculum also fosters inclusivity by integrating the Indian Sign Language for learners with hearing impairments. It is also highly flexible to be hosted across platforms with contextual, multilingual, and age-appropriate content, making it an innovative way to continue student learning during the pandemic. 

We do this at a nominal cost of ~10$ per child while other organizations in the same field start at ~40$ per child per year.

India is a nation of haves and have-nots with vast socio-economic and gender-based inequalities dictating a child’s course of life. In the education system - spaces and opportunities that equip children to thrive, irrespective of their circumstances - are thus an urgent need. At SOL, we leverage the arts as a tool with children to enable them with creative-confidence while also empowering them to address societal challenges of gender, mental health, climate change, and diversity. Through our programs, children learn to question the status quo, feel empowered to ideate solutions and become active citizens. So far,

• Through one-of-its-kind, multilingual, self-learning art curriculum; SOL has enabled creation of 75000+ original artworks by children, 15 of our children have been TEDx speakers and been featured in prominent news publications for their art

• We’ve enabled 6X increase in access to art-based learning hours and significant growth in Creative-Confidence skills for each child

• Learning content developed by SOL is disseminated to children across 23 (of 31) Indian States, in sustainable partnerships with over 610 sub-national, national and global partners 

• Through knowledge partnerships with Girl Rising and World’s Largest Lesson, SOL has enabled creation of knowledge products that integrate gender and climate action with art.

Currently, our programs are reaching a cumulative number of 4.7 million children. This number is derived primarily from impact assessments of 3 major programs:

1. The Jijivisha Fellowship (TJF)

2. Voice for All (VFA)

3. Arts for All (AFA) 

The table below offers the current number of students served and our projection for the next 1 and 5 years:

Current Numbers

TJF: 1000 children

VFA: 50,000 children

AFA:  4.1 Million children

3 Year Projection

TJF: 3000 children 

VFA: 5,00,000 children

AFA: 6 Million children

5 Year Projection

TJF: 10,000 children 

VFA + AFA: 20 Million children

Slam Out Loud is committed to scaling up the breadth and depth of impact across all three programmes:

The Jijivisha Fellowship
Our first impact goal is to expand the reach of this programme to 10,000 children in the next 5 years. This will be enabled through a combination of the following - 1) building strong partnerships with local non-profits and government schools 2) recruiting and training a larger cohort of Fellows. The second goal is to drive significant improvements in creative confidence for all participating children. We will make this possible through investments in data driven improvements to content design and delivery.

Voice for All and Arts for All:
We aim to expand both programmes to achieve pan-India scale and reach 20 million children by 2026. The pathway to achieve this goal consists of - 1) strong partnerships with other government and non-governmental applications 2) strong local networks with parents and teachers 3) improvement in cost effectiveness. The second goal is to improve the impact of the content on socio-emotional learning. We will achieve this by investing heavily in bringing in expert guidance and developing strong M&E systems.

We have identified the following barriers:

-Market: Art learning through low tech platforms has not been used at scale especially in India and SE Asia. We’re trying to create a market itself through institutional as well as government partnerships (and have succeeded in certain places) but often this process is fraught with red-tapism, bureaucracy which brings a degree of uncertainty. We will also need to build awareness and promote the value and social impact of arts based learning, creating a demand for Arts based learning

-Operations: We’re a lean team and have stretched our capacities with the challenge of content requirement steadily increasing with the program process. We hope to mitigate this in the future by having a strong volunteering program with volunteers who specialise in content creation.

-Finance: API/IVR are largely platforms that lead to project costs shooting up with scale. We hope to rely on institutional partnerships to cover part of our costs.

-Regulations: Child protection regulations vary across different countries. Since Slam Out Loud’s primary beneficiaries are children, it will be paramount to ensure that parental permissions and individual data protection is focused upon depending upon regions, and strong law support on these elements will be necessary

-International Advocacy around Social and Emotional Learning and Arts based Education: Getting the awards would enable us to create a pipeline of possible partners-whether these are practitioners, policy makers or researchers from across the world to promote quality and equitable Social Emotional Learning through the arts. Through the larger platform we would benefit attracting a host of such potential partners to drive action. 

-Spotlighting our children on international platforms: The award can give us opportunities to bring some of our  children to stages that must bring their voices to the forefront. I this opportunity unlocking valuable social capital from the least represented communities, and children like the ones we work with, the ones who've never had a seat at the table being future cultural curators

-Media campaigns around social justice issues led by the voices of children and youth: Children and youth often use compelling stories and art for social action - challenging established narratives and offering imaginative alternatives. The award can enable us put these offerings into the world.

Implementation support to other organizations: Amplification of our resources can enable us to support schools and education systems to bring equitable SEL and arts based learning to children.

Despite being a small team, our organization culture aims to consciously develop a team that’s diverse in representation (in terms of gender/sexual orientation, language, religion, race, caste, age-group, and experience). 

Diversity and Inclusion as a strategic priority and our hiring process for the fellowship and full-time roles has meant expanding our recruiting sources ensuring that we specifically reach out to associations of oppressed and historically marginalized communities for roles. Hiring a specially-abled individual on our team, also recently gave us the opportunity to train the staff on practicing inclusion.

We invest in equitable leadership opportunities for our team by providing in-house or external spaces of mentoring, coaching, personal and professional development. 

Our communication strategy ensures that all our stories of children who have been beneficiaries of our programs are stories of empowerment that do not create negative stereotypes about our beneficiaries.

As a result over the years, we've had team members and fellows who identify themselves from the LGBTI+ community, oppressed groups as well as disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. In fact, we have already seen success in getting fellows and interns who reflect the communities we serve. We have a woman CEO and 75% of our team is of women leaders.

Our team has the attitude, skills and experiences to get SOL to our vision and scale in the coming few years. Our team comes from backgrounds of arts, education, fundraising, monitoring and evaluation, communication design and marketing - all of which together make us best placed to execute our scaling strategy.

Business Development, Curriculum Design and Fundraising

-Jigyasa Labroo (CEO/Co-Founder): Computer Science Engineer and alumni of Teach for India, WISE, SIF, specializes in Fundraising and Business -Development

-Umaima Ehtasham (Specialist: Curriculum and Digital Pedagogy): Alumni of Piramal Foundation’s Gandhi Fellowship; specializes in curriculum development

-Aastha Singh (Communications Associate): History and Visual Art, Ashoka University, Communications and Digital Marketing specialist

Monitoring & Evaluation, Program Development and Implementation

-Gaurav Pratap Singh (COO/Co-Founder): Masters in Public Administration from National University of Singapore; Teach for India alum; specializes in M&E, Operations, Finance and HR

-Drashti Shah: Alumn of NMIMS, Ashoka University and ISDM with past experience from Akanksha Foundation; Leads programs operations, Management and facilitation 

- Mridula Reddy: Alumni of FLAME University and an ex Teach For India Fellow; supports program operations and management 

-Akash Pattanayak: Consultant - Data on Demand Associate with ID Insight, Product Design Consultant

Our model that placed artists in classrooms or worked with teachers was predominantly offline. When COVID-19 struck, and schools shut down, our students kept pressing us for a way to keep their learning going. In response, we launched Arts for All, to bring children the experiences we knew were so important from our offline work. Using the ubiquitous nature of WhatsApp we delivered byte-sized art-for-wellbeing lessons to students every day. To our amazement, within four weeks of the launch, 510 other non-profits, schools, and learning bodies signed up for the program. Over the past nine months, we’ve designed localized, engaging, and need-sensitive learning resources that have reached 4.7 million students in 19 countries! This project also ended up being selected as a case study by Harvard, OECD, World Bank Group, and HundrED’s joint initiative mapping some of the best and most innovative Education Continuity Stories, from across the world.

While some of our students could hustle up engaging, crisply-edited video stories using TikTok, many others (mostly girls) were discouraged from recording themselves by their own families. Yet, by leveraging the power of art, mass media, and tech platforms we are proving that contextualized art-based learning can happen effectively at scale.

SOL pitch video shown at Helsinki Education Week, Finland

Slam Out Loud Success Story at the HundrED Innovation Summit 2020

TedX Gateway - Slam Out Loud's Vision

TedX Salon - Muskan's Performance

Featured by Sesame Street to enable parents in supporting children at home during lockdowns

Spolighted by The LEGO foundation

Student Performances at Kommune's Spoken Fest

The additional funding will enable us to:

1. Invest in technology towards innovation

Content delivery: Setting up java/ python run automated WhatsApp Chatbots to make learning personalised

Testing interventions: Set up team that works on pilot programs slated for the next 3 years Curriculum Development: Engaging with top talent in the arts, education and SEL to create world class content and curriculum that is quickly iterated and tested out Unlocking greater capital and Partnerships by hiring top talents across the verticals of Product, Tech development, Marketing, Partnerships and Communications  Investing in setting up org processes for finance, hiring and learning and development

2. Monitoring and Evaluation to have India’s first arts focused assessment tools

External quantitative evaluation of our current programs

Testing international SEL scales , driving data and learnings to improve on our own contextualised version.

Research and Development: Partner with international academia and hire consultants to improve our current M&E methods especially in the digital ecosystems

3. Accelerating growth

Expanding Jijivisha to higher number of geographies and pilot partner entrepreneur program

Creating higher platforming opportunities for children eg call for art works, open workshops, open mics etc.

Serving a higher number of government partners (Have demand but lack capital)

We are currently partnering with :

UNICEF: to work with 25000 schools across India on using arts and building skills and mindsets for COVID sensitization.

Gram Vaani: To reach out to children in low or not network areas to use arts in building socio-emotional skills

DIKSHA: Indian government's teacher training platform to equip teachers with the arts based learning resources to ensure children's wellbeing and skill-building

Girl Rising: To create gender-focused, arts-based programs and content for children across India

World's Largest Lesson: To create climate action resources for children across India to build mindsets and skills to be advocates for climate restoration

Boston Consulting Group: to scale our curriculum across 4 Indian states for children in government schools