Vishal Talreja is the co-founder and trustee of Dream a Dream, a pioneering non-profit that uses creative life-skills education through sports, arts and experiential learning to help children and young people from vulnerable backgrounds overcome adversity and thrive.
Over the past 24–25 years Dream a Dream has reached millions through direct programmes, teacher training and state partnerships.
In 2023 he launched The Cocoon Initiative, a programme that funds and designs paid sabbaticals for social-sector leaders to rest, recover and return to their work with renewed capacity.
Vishal is an Ashoka Fellow and an Eisenhower Fellow, and he frequently contributes to national and international education and wellbeing conversations.
Key Takeaway:
One Caring Adult Can Change a Child’s Entire Life
Vishal strongly reinforces that the presence of just one empathetic, non-judgmental adult—a parent, teacher, volunteer, or community member—can be a life-altering force for a child, especially those growing up in adversity. Trust, care, and consistency from one adult can build safety, confidence, and belief that no system or policy alone can replace.
Children Are Not the Problem—The Systems Around Them Are
Across decades of work, Vishal’s belief has only grown stronger: children are whole, capable, and full of potential. The real barriers lie in adult-created systems—social norms, caste and gender biases, structural inequities, and rigid education models—that prevent children from thriving. Real change requires adults to look inward and redesign society, not “fix” children.
Life Skills Prepare Children for Life, Not Just Survival
While care homes and schools often provide safety, food, and education, many children lack life skills like decision-making, self-belief, emotional regulation, and the ability to seek help. Dream a Dream’s work highlights that without these skills, young people struggle to transition into independent adulthood, regardless of academic qualifications.
Owning One’s Story Is a Powerful Act of Healing
Instead of asking children to “forget the past,” Vishal emphasizes the importance of owning one’s story—including trauma, hardship, and marginalization. When children accept where they come from without shame, they gain resilience, self-belief, and the power to shape their future rather than be defined by their past.
Confidence Is Built Through Dignity and Respect
Many vulnerable children grow up believing “I am not good enough.” Vishal shares how a single moment of respect, recognition, or validation—being trusted, being called “sir,” being heard—can dismantle years of internalized shame. Confidence often begins not with achievement, but with dignity.
Sustainable Change Within Systems Requires Listening and Co-Creation
Dream a Dream’s work with state governments shows that top-down solutions rarely work. Real, scalable impact happens when organizations first listen, understand local contexts, and co-create solutions with teachers, policymakers, and administrators. Trust, not prescriptions, drives systemic change.
Rest Is Not a Luxury—It Is Essential for Social Impact Leaders
Through The Cocoon Initiative, Vishal brings attention to an often ignored truth: burnout in the social sector is real and dangerous. Pausing, resting, and healing through paid sabbaticals allows leaders to return with clarity, compassion, and renewed capacity. Sustainable social change is impossible if the people driving it are constantly exhausted.
Transcript:
Chethan K (Host): Hi Vishal. Welcome to EdexLive.
Vishal Talreja (Guest): Thank you for the opportunity.
Chethan K (Host): After 25 years in the social impact space, what is one belief about children that has only grown stronger with time?
Vishal Talreja (Guest): There are so many insights that we have learned which have become into strong belief systems about children and young people.
Maybe I’ll share more than one, if that's all right. One of the early learning’s that we had, especially when we are working with children and young people growing up in marginalization or adversity, is that the presence of at least one caring, empathetic adult in their lives, which could be a parent, someone in the community they're staying in, or a volunteer or a facilitator or a youth worker, just one adult who trusts them, who does not judge them, who brings care and empathy into the relationship with that person can be a game changer for life because what children need at a young age is someone who can trust them, someone who cares for them, someone who shows up for them.
That's been one important belief.
The other is that the more we work with children and young people, we realize that the challenge is not with them. It's not their lack of capacity or potential, and does not matter what backgrounds or early experiences of childhood or life circumstances they come from.
The challenge is the way we have designed society, the socio‑cultural norms, the systemic barriers, structural inequities that we have created as adults, the biases and stereotypes that we have created that are preventing children from truly living up to their potential and thriving. We need to actually look inward as adults, at the kind of societies we are creating for our children.
Chethan K (Host): What was the moment or experience that first made you realise that life skills education can change a child's life forever? And what made you do it?
Vishal Talreja (Guest): That's such an important question. Dream a Dream started in 1999. It was a group of volunteers, most of us just out of college, we’d just graduated, coming together and initially our intention was just to spend weekends volunteering our time and skills with children who are growing up in some marginalization and adversity.
Our initial volunteering experiences were with HIV‑positive children or cancer‑affected children, and they were living in care homes and they were also children who were either abandoned or had run away from home, living in care homes.
What we realised is that while the care homes created spaces of safety and took care of the basic necessities of a child – access to food, clothing, a safe shelter, and access to education – the children were not necessarily ready for life outside the care homes.
As per law, every child at the age of 18 is expected to leave the care home and become independent and as we started spending more and more time in these care homes with the children, we realised that they didn't have the abilities to make choices, make decisions for themselves, build support systems, seek help, for a life that would have been independent.
That led us to a very simple question of, how did we end up becoming who we are and, being so confident in life and being able to make choices and decisions?
That's when we hit upon this idea that children growing up in care homes or in marginalization don't have access to life skills and life skills we defined as any kind of abilities and behaviours that every individual needs to deal with demands and challenges of daily life, and these children were lacking that.
That's how we entered the life skills space. The reasons keep renewing themselves over the years. For me personally, I didn't pick up this as a career.
This was not my career choice. Like I said, Dream a Dream started as a volunteer organization and all of us wanted to run it as a volunteer organization.
But the more time I spent with children in care homes, on the streets, volunteering with other spaces, I started going through my own internal change process.
A lot of questions that started coming up around the idea of my own privilege –growing up in an upper‑caste, reasonably upper‑class society, as a man growing up in a patriarchal home and how in my growing up years I was exposed to certain prejudices and biases against other communities who were living around us in our neighbourhood, but I believed that was just how society is, that some people are treated differently.
But then when I started volunteering, I started asking the question around why are some communities, some people treated differently because of either their caste or class or gender religion or race? Why can't we live in a society where every human being is treated with dignity and respect that they deserve?
These questions at one point became very difficult to live with. I was working with an investment bank then, and I couldn't live with the dissonance that at one level I'm building a career of privilege, a life of privilege, at another level I'm sitting on these questions that I don't have answers to.
At one point I said I want to, kind of make a shift to the social sector, learn, find answers to some of these complex questions that I have, and hopefully then create meaningful change in society.
Chethan K (Host): That's nice. You have worked with millions of children across India. What one small heart‑touching story still reminds you why you started Dream a Dream?
Vishal Talreja (Guest): That's very difficult to say, because there are so many over years and one of them that I can think of now, which is also featured in a book that we published a couple of years back, is this young woman Pallavi, who used to go to a affordable private school in a Bandra slum community, and we used to run a host of life skills programs in her school as an after‑school program.
When she joined one of our programs, she chose to join a football‑based life skills program that we used to run, one of the very few girls in the program.
She was also extremely quiet and shy and she wouldn't even lift up her head to make eye contact with the facilitator who would come.
But over the years, as she built her confidence playing the game and started building peer relationships, friendships, started realizing that she's a good football player, we could see the very evident change in her body language, and then she got an opportunity to go to Brazil during the FIFA World Cup with a group of young people, and watch a few matches, meet other young people from other parts of the world, which really boosted her sense of self‑belief, confidence.
She came back, she joined us as a facilitator after she turned 18, she became a life skills facilitator with Dream a Dream, but she continued to be very shy and unsure of herself.
The shift for us was that why this story is so important is that the neighbourhood she was living in was beginning to lose public spaces because of development that was happening and gentrification that was happening in the neighbourhood.
She started working with the local community leaders, school principals, local politicians, local philanthropists in her community, and managed to get public space purely as a play space for children in her community.
It took her about 10 months of hard work and lobbying and working with different stakeholders, and I remember she invited me at the inauguration of this space. She got a bunch of people from the community to clean it up, set it up, and there were these 11 men from the community, all important influential people in the community, on stage inaugurating the space and then there was this 21‑year‑old girl Pallavi, just this one girl who managed to convince 11 powerful men that we have to invest in a public play space for children and since then, the space is used by over a thousand kids every day, week on week, by schools, by young people in the community as a safe space where they can come in and play.
This was the power of the transformation she saw through her own process of self‑belief.
Chethan K (Host): Many young people today feel lost or unsure about their future. What is the simplest life skill you believe every child must learn to thrive?
Vishal Talreja (Guest): At the core of it, for me it's about owning your story and what I mean by that is, especially for children who come from marginalization and adversity, where they've experienced possibly neglect, lack of emotional love and care in their family or community, in extreme cases exposure to violence, abuse, displacement, gentrification, being displaced from their homes or villages, they're growing up with a lot of trauma and typically when they come into school environments or they come across mentors, volunteers, the narrative is “forget your past and focus on your future.”
But what that leaves them with is a sense of shame and guilt around their past, that “my past is not good enough and that's why I'm a failure, that's why I'm not succeeding.”
But what we have managed to work through in our life skills engagement with them is to own the story. Own the story of your past, to have come from certain experiences, not necessarily all pleasant experiences, but those stories have shaped you in certain ways, yet they don't define your future.
When you own the story, there's a process of healing that happens: “This is where I come from and it's all right” and there are millions of others who come from similar life experiences, similar stories, but that doesn't have to shape how I look at my own future.
That level of owning the story gives them a lot of power to then shape their own pathways for the future. It gives them a sense of self‑belief, where they can share their story with the strength of their own voice. They share their story with the resilience of their own voice, and this then helps them shape pathways for the future.
Chethan K (Host): Dream a Dream has worked closely with governments and schools. What has been the biggest learning for you while working inside the system?
Vishal Talreja (Guest): Today we work with about seven state governments across the country, where we help governments introduce life‑skills curriculums, life‑skills‑focused pedagogical approaches, and new assessment systems and one of our biggest learnings has been that if we go to a government system with a solution saying “this is what we know works and if adopted it never works”.
What we have to do is first engage with the ecosystem from a space of listening, understanding what are their pain points, what are their struggles, understanding their own personal journeys of the bureaucrat, of the policymaker, of the politician, of the school leader.
When we create spaces for listening, it builds trust and when trust is built, then we can co‑create solutions, and that's very important if we want to create sustainable solutions within the government system.
We learned that when you go with a fixed solution, it becomes just another problem, because it's again one‑size‑fits‑all curriculum, one‑size‑fits‑all pedagogical approach, which does not fit into the context.
Every state has its own context, localized context, localized challenges. If you want the system to own the solution, we listen to them, we co‑create with them, we design with them, and we work with them for them to take ownership of the solution. That is what has worked for us.
Chethan K (Host): The Cocoon Initiative focuses on rest and healing of social leaders. In your view, why is pausing just as vital as progressing?
Vishal Talreja (Guest): Just to give a bit of a context, the Cocoon Initiative is independent, something that I started about two years back.
The Cocoon Initiative came from my own experience as a leader, having run Dream a Dream for 18 years now, continuing to be part of the leadership at Dream a Dream, dealing with my own fatigue and burnout resulting in a host of physical and mental health challenges that I’ve been dealing with over the last few years.
As I went deeper into that, I realised that it is not just me. There is a whole host of leaders in the social sector – founders to executive directors to people in leadership positions – who are experiencing a sense of burnout and fatigue, because the challenges we’re dealing with are becoming more and more complex.
A lot of the gains that we have had through our work over the last two decades, many of them come undone because of the constant shift in challenges that we’re seeing, the shift in society that we’re seeing, the fast pace of change that’s happening in society, whether it’s because of political upheavals, polarization, or technological advancements. There’s a sense of overwhelm.
So the Cocoon Initiative was designed to support social‑sector leaders in India to take a break from their work, step away from their organization for a period of three months to a year, taking a sabbatical, using that time period to rest, to heal, to reset, rejuvenate, to reflect on their journey, to think about how they want to show up as a different kind of leader in this constant pace of change that we’re seeing in society, how they want to shift cultures in their organizations.
Just step away, take a break, take a sabbatical, and we support that for them. We provide financial support for anyone wanting to take a sabbatical from three months to a year.
We take care of their living expenses for the period of the sabbatical. In addition to that, if they want to do something during the sabbatical for their own health or healing or rest – which might be, say, they want to travel, they want to go on a wellbeing retreat, they want to do a host of health checkups, or they want to kind of recover from a complex health issue that they have – we support that.
But they design their own sabbatical. It’s a highly personalized approach. As a leader, you design your own sabbatical, you design the timing, you design the duration, and we provide the financials.
Chethan K (Host): That's a good initiative Vishal. From Xerox and investing firms to social impact, your journey is inspiring. What gave you the courage to leave a stable path and follow your heart?
Vishal Talreja (Guest): I would say a little bit of naivety and craziness because I made the shift when I was, well, Dream a Dream started when I was 21 and I moved in full time when I was 23.
At that time I didn't necessarily have clarity on my career path, on my future, on a sense of purpose or meaning that I need to have in life. I was deeply passionate about creating an Indian society that is grounded on values of dignity and respect for every human being. I didn’t know the pathway to that.
Dream a Dream kind of became an entry point and I’m glad I made that choice even though it came from a space of not really knowing what I was getting into, because it's helped me build a life that I’m truly content with, in spite also of the challenges that I’ve gone through. There is a deep sense of meaning and purpose that I have in my life.
I wouldn’t so much say that I left something that was stable. I don’t know what I left, because I hadn’t experienced it yet. But I’m glad I followed my heart.
Chethan K (Host): If every parent and teacher in India could understand just one thing about their children, what should that one thing be?
Vishal Talreja (Guest): What the children have taught me is that every child I have encountered, every young person I’ve encountered in 25 years of this journey, is whole in themselves. They’re complete in themselves.
Whether you meet a 1‑year‑old, whether you meet a 4‑year‑old or a 17‑year‑old, they’re complete human beings in themselves. We’re not here to fix them. Our role is not to fix them. Our role is not to make them better.
Our role is not to kind of give them our own belief systems. Our role is to walk the journey with them, to give them the sense of safety, trust, being non‑judgmental, being caring, bringing creativity into their lives, bringing joy and play and fun into their lives, and see where life takes them. They shape their own journeys. They shape their own pathways and our role is to support that.
Chethan K (Host): You often speak about resilience and confidence. In your experience, what helps a vulnerable child build a belief in them for the very first time?
Vishal Talreja (Guest): I think at the core of it is that, that “I am good, I’m enough.”
I remember in the early years the number of children coming to us with this belief that “I’m not good enough” and I remember this young man that today works with us, is in the research team with us. He joined us as a facilitator, and the first day he went to the school as a facilitator, he came back very overwhelmed. I sat down with him and asked him what happened.
He said, “Sir, I went into the school and, you know, the teachers gave me a class and I did my life‑skills session, and it went very well. But through the session there were these teachers who were standing behind the class and observing me,” and he was only 18 at that time, “and I was very scared. I thought maybe they'll find mistakes, maybe they’ll tell me not to come back.”
But then at the end of the session they called me to the staff room. They made me sit next to them and they said, “Sir, the session that you did today was very, very good. We really enjoyed it.”
You know what stayed with him was that they called him “sir,” because he told me that when he was a child, his own family told him he’s not good enough, that he’s an idiot, he’s useless. People in the community around him told him he’s useless, he’s not good enough.
So he grew up believing that he’s useless and this was the first time in his life where he got the respect that he believed he deserved. That changed his belief system about himself.
Chethan K (Host): My final question is, if you could wave a magic wand and add just one life skill to every Indian school curriculum tomorrow, what would it be and why?
Vishal Talreja (Guest): I so wish I had a magic wand. I think for us at Dream a Dream it would be empathy. Again, coming back to this idea that all of us are living in a very complex world today. We’re dealing with lots of complex challenges and they’re just getting more and more complex, and children are going to grow up in this society. They’re dealing with climate change, there’s technological advancement, high levels of polarization, feeling of hatred, othering just happening because of identities. Children are dealing with a lot.
What children need more than anything else is to learn to find empathy for themselves and empathy for the other. I remember a school that we visited quite a few years back. It was a school in a rural community where some children were sitting on the floor and some children were sitting on benches, and we were very confused about it.
After the session we asked, “Why is this?” and the teacher said, ‘The kids sitting on the floor are from a different caste to the kids sitting on the bench. They’re from the lower caste, that’s why they sit on the floor.’
Now, as long as we continue to create systems like this, the kid who’s sitting on the floor, who’s constantly being given this message that ‘you’re not good enough because you come from a different caste,’ that kid is not going to grow up and thrive in life.
Unless we as a community shift ideas around identity and empathy, and if every child in that classroom could grow up having empathy for each other, then we will be able to create a society where everyone is thriving and a planet where everyone is thriving.
Chethan K (Host): Thank you very much for being on EdexLive, Vishal. It was wonderful talking to you
Vishal Talreja (Guest): Thank you for the opportunity.