Rajeshwari Aladiyan remembers a childhood where choice was a luxury. By seven, school gave way to housework. Playtime dissolved into responsibility. The idea of a future shaped by dreams rather than duty felt distant. What she did have were weekends at a community centre, where she discovered computers, spoken English, accounting software, and a sense of agency. More than skills, she finally found language for her ambition.
“No one around me had chosen beauty as a career,” she recalls. “I was scared. My family wasn’t sure. But something told me to try.” With a Rs 20,000 seed grant, she bought her first beauty kit and began knocking on doors, offering services one home appointment at a time. Today, she trains hundreds of young people as beauticians, many from backgrounds similar to hers. The shift, she insists, is psychological.
Stories like Rajeshwari’s sit at the heart of Dream a Dream, a Bengaluru-based nonprofit that has spent 25 years working with children and adolescents facing poverty, stigma, and disrupted childhoods. Over time, its work led to a simple insight: even when basic needs are met, many young people struggle to grow into confident, independent adults. “Working closely with young people growing up with adversity made me reflect deeply on the kind of impact I wanted to create,” says CEO Suchetha Bhat. The organisation also focuses on life skills and social-emotional learning as essential to education.
The future, as Bhat puts it, is about systemic change. “We plan to embed life skills and SEL across public education systems,” she says. “This includes deepening state government partnerships by co-creating and strengthening curriculum design, teacher training, assessments, and whole-school approaches so that life skills are part of everyday learning.” The organisation is pushing to shift narrow definitions of success—away from grades and towards wellbeing, dignity, lifelong learning, and resilience, reaching over 2.3 million young people and training more than 66,000 educators across seven states.
But the deeper impact is harder to quantify. It lies in the way a young person begins to see themselves not as a problem to be fixed but as a participant in their own future. The story Rajeshwari, like many others illustrates that arc. If survival was once the goal, thriving has become the aspiration. And in homes where children are now encouraged to experiment with ambition rather than suppress it, that shift is already underway.