Jigyasa Labroo

Co-founder

Jigyasa Labroo is the co-founder of Slam Out Loud [1], an Indian non-profit working on education, arts & culture and women & children from New Delhi.

Jigyasa Labroo is an Indian educator and the co-founder and chief executive of Slam Out Loud, a non-profit organisation that uses poetry, storytelling, theatre and the visual arts to build creative confidence and social and emotional learning among children from under-resourced communities in India.

She founded the organisation in 2017 with Gaurav Singh. The two had met as Teach For India fellows teaching at a government girls' school in Tughlakabad, Delhi, where they began running arts sessions for their students after concluding that schooling in disadvantaged settings was measured almost entirely by academic results.

Early life and education

Labroo studied at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, taking the Learning Design, Innovation and Technology programme as a K.C. Mahindra scholar.

Career

Before founding Slam Out Loud, Labroo taught full-time in a low-income community as a Teach For India fellow. Slam Out Loud began as spoken-word poetry workshops run in classrooms and was formalised as an organisation after the co-founders had delivered dozens of workshops around the country.

As chief executive she leads programme development, fundraising and partnerships. The organisation trains government school teachers to run weekly arts classes and publishes open-source creative resources. It reports having worked directly with more than 300,000 children, trained over 1,600 teachers, and reached several million more through digital resources.

Recognition

Labroo was named to the Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 list in the social impact category in 2022. She was selected as an Echoing Green Global Fellow in 2023. She has also been an Emerging Education Leader with WISE, a global 30 Under 30 nominee of the International Literacy Association, a Falling Walls winner in Berlin in 2021, and a recipient of HundrED's Innovator of the Year award.[2][3][4][5]

Slam Out Loud

Slam Out Loud uses the arts — theatre, poetry, storytelling and visual art — to build what it calls Creative Confidence in children aged 6 to 17 from disadvantaged communities: communication, critical thinking and empathy. Professional artists are placed in classrooms through the Jijivisha Fellowship, while Arts For All and Voice For All carry the same curriculum over low-tech channels such as WhatsApp and interactive voice response, so children without devices or reliable connectivity are not left out. Registered as Foundation of Arts For Social Change, a Section 8 company based in Kalkaji, New Delhi.

Slam Out Loud reports the following, on its own site: