Vishal Talreja

Co-founder

Vishal Talreja is the co-founder of Dream a Dream [1], an Indian non-profit working on education, mental health and women & children from Bengaluru.

Vishal Talreja is an Indian social entrepreneur and educator who co-founded Dream a Dream, a Bangalore-based non-profit organisation, in 1999 with eleven others. Dream a Dream works on life skills and social and emotional learning for children growing up in poverty and adversity, running its own programmes and working with state governments on curriculum, pedagogy and assessment; by the mid-2020s its work covered six Indian states.

He is a co-founder and trustee of Dream a Dream, and is also a writer and poet.

Career

Talreja has co-authored four research papers on life skills in the Indian context with David Pearson and Fiona Kennedy, and has written articles, white papers and policy briefs on the transformation of education. With Connie K. Chung and Dream a Dream staff and participants he co-wrote the book When We Thrive, Our World Thrives, and he has published a collection of poems, My Soul Stirring.

He was previously founder-director of UnLtd India and a board member of PYE Global and the India Cares Foundation. He is a board member of Goonj, an executive committee member of Karanga, the global alliance on life skills and social and emotional learning, and a co-founder of the Weaving Lab. In 2023 he started the Cocoon Initiative, which supports civil society leaders in India in taking a sabbatical. He mentors social entrepreneurs and serves on international steering groups and working groups on education.

Recognition

Talreja is an Ashoka Fellow, an Eisenhower Fellow and a Salzburg Global Fellow. He was named an Architect of the Future by the Waldzell Institut in Austria and Innovator of the Year by HundrED in 2019. In 2025 he received The Better India's Education Changemaker of the Year award for his twenty-five years of work through Dream a Dream.[2][3][4]

Dream a Dream

Dream a Dream is a registered charitable trust working on life skills for children and young people from vulnerable backgrounds. It also runs teacher training and advocacy on the wider education system.

Dream a Dream reports the following, on its own site:

2.2 million children impacted through state partnerships in Delhi, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Telangana and Karnataka
110,000 young people impacted through direct delivery programmes in Karnataka
44,000 teachers impacted through training programmes