Saturday Art Class

Unleashing Creativity and Confidence in India’s Classrooms

Manasi Mehan never imagined that a simple request from one of her students would spark a movement to transform arts education in India. As a Teach for India fellow teaching in a low-income government school in Mumbai, Mehan was focused on improving her students’ literacy and numeracy skills. But when a student asked why they weren’t doing any real art in their art classes, Mehan realized there was a gaping hole in the education system.

“These children are tiny human beings, but they play the role of adults in their lives just because of the backgrounds they come from, the communities they come from, the violence they’ve faced, the poverty that has made them the people, the children that they are,” Mehan explains. “And schools are not providing them the space to just be children.”

Determined to give her students a creative outlet, Mehan teamed up with her co-founder Chhavi Khandelwal to launch Saturday Art Class in 2016. What started as a single classroom experiment has now blossomed into a movement reaching over 178,000 children across 13 states in India.

The key to Saturday Art Class’s success has been its focus on social-emotional learning alongside artistic expression. “We’re looking at these incremental changes that are also holistically changing the child,” says Mehan, who recently graduated from Harvard Graduate School of Education and has a background in psychology. By tracking behavioral indicators like communication, collaboration, and creative thinking, the program aims to foster well-rounded development in marginalized students.

Saturday Art Class is poised for even greater impact, thanks to Mehan’s experience in the Catapult accelerator program. There, she gained valuable insights into leveraging technology to scale the program’s reach and how to leverage educational research to amplify impact. The team is now piloting an AI-powered WhatsApp chatbot to provide art education resources to teachers in even the most remote parts of India.

“I see an India where every child can just create, and we’re helping them, every child, to just unleash their creative potential,” Mehan says. With ambitious plans to reach 5 million children by 2030, Saturday Art Class is on a mission to transform the educational landscape in India, one brushstroke at a time.