Amrita Nair

Co-founder

Amrita Nair is the co-founder of Apni Shala Foundation [1], an Indian non-profit working on education and mental health from Mumbai.

Amrita Nair is an Indian educator and counsellor and a co-founder of the Apni Shala Foundation, a Mumbai-based non-profit organisation that works on social and emotional learning for children from low-income communities. She serves as a director of the foundation, with responsibility for research and development and advocacy, covering training, recruitment and organisational policy.

Apni Shala runs experiential learning programmes in schools using art, drama, games and community work, trains educators and other organisations to deliver social and emotional learning, and operates the Khoj learning centre in Mankhurd, Mumbai.

Early life and education

Nair holds a bachelor's degree in psychology and a master's degree in social entrepreneurship. She has been trained in personal counselling, rational emotive behaviour therapy and Theatre of the Oppressed, and is a trained library educator.

Career

Before founding Apni Shala, Nair worked as a teacher with the Akanksha Foundation and as a counsellor at a shelter for boys in Thane.

In 2011 she co-founded Apni Shala with Swetha Ranganathan and Anukriti Goyal. The three concluded that a sound education should support children's emotional and social development as well as their academic progress, and that children from low-income backgrounds faced additional hardships that slowed that development.

At Apni Shala, Nair works on inclusive education and well-being, delivers diversity, equity and inclusion training, counsels, and facilitates Theatre of the Oppressed sessions. She has developed policies intended to improve employee well-being across identities within the organisation. She is a former Wipro Seeding Fellow and consults with Adhyayan Quality Education Services. She writes on social and emotional learning, including for India Development Review.[2][3][4][5][6]

Apni Shala Foundation

Apni Shala Foundation works on social-emotional learning, which it describes as nurturing cognitive, emotional and behavioural well-being for self and society. Based in Mumbai, it delivers experiential programmes using art, drama, games and community work in schools, runs its Khoj community lab school and a whole-school transformation initiative, trains educators and organisations through SEL Shala and Diversity Shala, and campaigns on mental health and inclusion.

Apni Shala Foundation reports the following, on its own site: