Tejashree Pol

Co-founder

Tejashree Pol is the co-founder of The Dharavi Dream Project (2013)[1], an Indian non-profit working on arts & culture and education from Mumbai.

Tejashree Pol is a co-founder of The Dharavi Dream Project, a Mumbai charity that teaches hip-hop music, rap, dance and beatboxing to young people from Dharavi and other under-resourced neighbourhoods. She is described on the organisation's website as co-founder and strategic compass, and serves as a non-executive director.

The organisation records that it was founded in December 2013 by Samir Bangara and Dolly Rateshwar together with two Mumbai hip-hop crews, and that its first community centre opened in a Dharavi shanty in May 2014.

Career

The Dharavi Dream Project runs an after-school programme in hip-hop, with instructors teaching rap, dance, beatboxing and music production, and provides mentoring and performance opportunities for its students. Pol has said that what brought her to the project was the idea of helping people express themselves through the right platform.

The project has worked with musicians including A. R. Rahman and Badshah as mentors to its students, and opened a recording studio in Dharavi in memory of Samir Bangara, who died in 2020.[2][3]

The Dharavi Dream Project

The Dharavi Dream Project (legally registered as Voice of Street Music Education and Learning Foundation) has run India's first 'AfterSchool of Hip-Hop' since 2014, based in Dharavi, one of Asia's largest informal settlements. It mentors young people through hip-hop culture, dance, music, and the arts, with its site reporting more than 150 students taught by 8 instructors across 5 disciplines, and documented festival performances in Arunachal Pradesh, Bangalore, and Delhi.

The Dharavi Dream Project reports the following, on its own site: