Maitreyee Kumar

Founder

Maitreyee Kumar is the founder of Dream School Foundation (2005)[1], an Indian non-profit working on education and livelihood from Bengaluru.

Maitreyee Kumar is the founder and executive director of the Dream School Foundation, a Bengaluru-based non-profit set up in 2005 that works on the right of children to a quality education. She started the organisation with a group of fellow volunteers after nearly a decade at the child rights organisation CRY.

The foundation runs school transformation work in government schools, youth development programmes and livelihood and employment support for young people from low-income families.

Early life and education

Kumar took a master's degree in computer science from the University of Pune and began her career as a software professional, working for more than eight years with multinational software development firms in India and abroad.

Career

Kumar left the software industry for the development sector and joined CRY (Child Rights and You), where she worked for close to a decade in resource generation and volunteer management and was instrumental in setting up and coordinating the organisation's Volunteer Action division at national level.

She founded the Dream School Foundation in Bengaluru in 2005 with a group of like-minded volunteers, on the view that while government efforts had put most children into school, the quality of education in those schools remained poor. The foundation's programmes have included school development work, the HeadStart initiative supporting vulnerable children through the transition from primary to secondary school, and later the Transformational Youth Development Engagement and Livelihood and Employment Assistance programmes.

Kumar has also been involved with weltwarts, the German federal development volunteer service, in the evaluation of its programme and the facilitation of youth volunteer exchange between India and Germany.

Recognition

Kumar has held a Sir Ratan Tata Trust fellowship.[2][3][4]

Dream School Foundation

Dream School Foundation (DSF) is a charitable trust formally registered in Bengaluru in April 2005, growing out of volunteer work that began in 2002. It works to break the cycle of socio-economic vulnerability for children from government schools through an Integrated Education and Development model connecting schools, children and communities, and extends support from schooling through to livelihood for young people up to age 24.

Dream School Foundation reports the following, on its own site: