The Hero Lab 2015 Annual Report

A N N U A L R E P O R T 2 0 1 5

,WThe quote on the left was said a few months about by Murli Kharvi, a remarkable young man who leads our Mumbai operations. What was most striking about this state-ment, beyond its wisdom, was who said it: a 21-year-old who grew up on the footpaths of Worli, Mumbai with a polythene sheet as a roof, an open drain as a toilet, and a budget of less than one dollar, or 67 rupees, a day. By all traditional measures of development, Murli had a laundry list of socioeconomic milestones to reach before he could practi-cally focus on happiness.

For the past year and half, our team has fought an upstream debate on the “priori-ties” of fighting poverty. How can you focus on happiness when kids can’t read at a third grade level? How can you teach well-being to those who are unemployed? Shouldn’t your first priority be to focus on physiological needs like food, shelter, physical health, and income?

Well-being and development are often made to seem exclusive, when they are really two sides of the same coin. To the above critics, we respond: How do kids without hope suc-ceed in school? How do employees with low resilience keep jobs after initial failure? How do families from adverse backgrounds man-age their perpetual, toxic stress that leads to poor health without understanding mindful-ness and emotional regulation? As important as our sustainable development goals are, we need well-being to enable and sustain them. Positive psychology and well-being training gave Murli the tools he needed to overcome his chronic depression, find a strong sense of meaning and purpose, and to rewire his life around what brought him the most joy: service to others. He re-enrolled in school af-

ter dropping out in the third grade, passed his tenth grade exams, and is teaching, leading, and mobilizing hundreds of youth around Mumbai to discover their resilience and potential. When he’s not working, Murli is in college (the first in his family!), pursuing a degree in commerce. The power of holis-tic well-being is just tremendous. Here are a few facts from the United Nations 2015 World Happiness Report that provide more insight:

• Well-Being is a science, with a validated methodology that has been tested in con-texts around the world.

• Emotional development is the best pre-dictor of life satisfaction, and academic achievement the worst

• Positive social relations like trust and kind-ness contribute to economic outcomes for individuals and communities

• There is neuroscientific evidence that practicing positive emotion, resilience, empathy, and mindfulness can measur-ably change the wiring of the brain.

Over the course of this report we hope to give you a closer look into the problem we’re try-ing to solve, how we’re doing so innovatively, and the stories of impact that have come out of our work. Thank you for your support and time as you enable our dreams.

With Gratitude, Adil Qureshi, Co-Founder

Siddhi Sundar, Co-Founder

Esha D’Mello, Co-Founder

“I’ve come to the realization that there are only two things that really matter deeply in a happy life: what we do for others and the relationships that we build.”

-Murli Kharvi

Dear Readers,

Well-being and happinessARE MORE INTEGRAL THAN EVER.

40%of Indian youth,

most low-income, drop out of school due to low hope and resilience

before the eighth grade, or the age

of 15. (HWR).

Community, relationships, and well-being are intricatelyconnected.

35.5

12.7

26.8

19.6

30.8

13.8

Global suicide rates per 100,000 people between the ages of 15 and 29 (WHO):

260%increased relative risk of obstructive lung disease and other illnesses.

460%increased chance of depression.

1,120% increased chance of suicide.

ADVERSE CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES (ACEs) are traumatic life events like violence, abuse, and drug use that can lead to long-term, nega-tive effects in a child’s health and well-being. An ACE Score of four or above (out of ten)

The average ACE score in the communities we work in is a 6.1

15years old is the entry point of India’s youth

suicide rate (ages 15-29), which is

the highest in the entire world (NIH).

85%of youth between 12 and 19 years old expressed

hopelessness and a lack of meaning and purpose prior

to suicide (Beck)

THE HERO LAB VISION

Our vision at The Hero Lab is to cultivate communities around the elements that allow for happiness, well-being, and locally-driven change. We dream of a world where people and communities focus on their strengths and not their weaknesses as indicators of their worth, and define success by a deep sense of meaning and purpose.

Our Story“Didi, what’s the easiest and fastest way for someone to kill himself?” asked a 13-year-old boy on the footpaths of Mumbai.

Siddhi Sundar, a filmmaker and re-cent college graduate with a passion

for storytelling, had travelled for two years through the interiors of rural In-dia, studying the state of public edu-cation. Adil Qureshi, a civil engineer who spent most of the past three years tackling campaign engagement strategies for brands and films, was around the same time working on an NGO campaign about low-income youth. Esha D’Mello, an occupational therapist with close to a decade of ex-perience working with children, was seeing more kids than ever failing to reach their potential due to the cut-throat environment in public schools.All three were asking the same ques-tion: So many of our kids are failing in this system, that there has to be something wrong with the way we measure success. What’s missing?

The question we were asked by the 13-year-old boy in Mumbai put a lot into perspective. In the midst of the traditional narrative on the inefficacy of government education and bored kids in a rote learning system was a far more serious problem: a lack of hope, a lack of purpose, and a lack of self-worth, stemming from kids’ adverse backgrounds, and worsening in a classroom that wasn’t designed to consider these backgrounds.

That’s where we come in.

ABOUT OUR FOUNDERSVISION Adil Qureshi, Co-Founder (right)

Adil is a civil engineer turned digi-tal marketing professional turned social entrepreneur. From forays in sustainable engineering and CSR marketing to leading the digital media campaign of Chennai Express, Adil’s interests are bound-less, but The Hero Lab has been his most special project to date. The only thing that competes for his attention? Real Madrid!

Siddhi Sundar, Co-Founder (left)Siddhi is a wanderlust with a BFA in Film from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Siddhi is interested in theconditions that allow people and communities to thrive and be re-silient, as well as how to use story-telling as a tool for health literacy, policy, and development. The Hero Lab is her heart and soul!

Esha D’Mello, Co-FounderEsha is an Occupational Therapist by profession, and oversees all of The Hero Lab’s health and educa-tion initiatives in Mumbai. She be-lieves firmly in the capacity of chil-dren to surpass their physical and socioeconomic barriers, and reach a stage of infinite potential and pos-sibility. Enabling youth to find their full capacity is Esha’s passion.

OUR MODEL

Stage 1 CurriculumThe Stage 1 curriculum is our first intervention in schools and communi-ties, and introduces youth to the basic tenets of positive psychology. We work on cultivating eight specific “Soft-Skills for Well Being”: grit and resil-ience, the use of character strengths, optimism and hope, empathy, grati-tude, mindfulness, active constructive response, and meaning and pur-pose. The curriculum results in a group-led, community capstone project that exercises what the students have learned. Student ages range from five to twelve years. Below are the average, starting well-being metrics across our five communities in Mumbai before our Stage 1 intervention:

How can we use design thinking and changemaking to build positive mental health?

We build three curricula at the nexus of our two major goals: 1) To boost psychological well-being, and 2) To cultivate the meaning and purpose required for youth to stay in school and discover their innate capacity to create change.

Stage 2 CurriculumThe Stage 2 curriculum continues to build the skills and mindsets intro-duced in Stage 1, but through a deep design thinking lens. Youth work in small groups to identify a problem they feel passionately about solving in their school or community, and prototype and launch a project to address the issue using local resources. Most students in the Stage 2 program are pre-teens and teens. Examples of student-launched projects include a com-munity cleanup campaign, art classes for local youth, a remedial education tutoring program, and a science fair. The big goal? To cultivate and sustain a strong sense of meaning and purpose.

STAGE 1 CURRICULUM

As of December 2015, we are implementing the Stage 1 curiculum in four Mumbai slums- Worli, Dharavi, Wadala, and Ramesh Nagar- and one government elementary school in Dadar. See the IMPACT sec-tion of this report for results from our pilot program in Worli.

STAGE 2 CURRICULUM

WELL-BEING METRIC PERCENTAGE (out of 100)

Curiosity 21.8%

Optimism and Hope 26.8%

Empathy 19.1%

Grit and Resilience 14.6%

Gratitude 25.2%

Meaning in Life 19.9%

General Happiness 19.5%

MUMBAI PRELIMINARY DATA

OUR MODEL

Stage 3 Curriculum- Adult Changemaker Program (ACP)The Stage 3 curriculum, also called the Adult Changemaker Program, gives entrepreneurial and resilience training to our oldest youth (usually ages 16 to 25) to work full-time on their own community change projects. The pro-gram builds capacities including financial literacy, action research, impact assessment, and other skills in social entrepreneurship while organically building grit, resilience, and our other key psychological metrics.

The Adult Changemaker Program presently has three wings:

1. THE COMMUNITY LEADER PROGRAM (CLP)

The Community Leader Program trains high-potential, young adults in low-income communities to teach our curricula to local youth, mobilize com-munity members to take action towards shared goals, and to oversee and maintain a culture of positivity and possibility in Mumbai’s slums.

As of December 2015, the Stage 2 curriculum is wrapping up its pilot program in Worli and at City Springs Elementary School in Baltimore (see Baltimore Pilot Program for more details). Upon completion of the Stage 1 program, students in our other communities will transition into this curriculum.

STAGE 3 CURRICULUM (ADULT CHANGEMAKERS)

2. THE COMMUNITY HEALTH EDUCATOR PROGRAM (CHEP)The CHEP empowers young women to become advocates for health literacy in their communities. Our health educators train bi-monthly with a healthcare pracitioner in topics of high importance to their community members. After training, health educators do door-to-door family visits in their communities and provide interac-tive classes, workshops, and resources to increase awareness and the adoption of preventive methods. Educators also assess baseline knowledge of each health topic prior to each intervention, and a family’s knowledge after each intervention.

Community Leaders become role models for youth-driven change in their neigh-borhoods. We have found that when our local leaders teach, attendance in class, learning levels, engagement with families, and general community morale are far, far greater than when an outsider teaches. Our community leaders are also responsible for local needs assessments, determining the viability of new pro-grams, collecting and analyzing data, and overseeing our Community Health Edu-cator Program (see below).

STAGE 2 CURRICULUM...

OUR MODEL

The Community Health Changemaker Program is currently active in four com-munties: Worli, Ramesh Nagar, Dharavi, and Wadala. Over the next six months, our health educators will cover the following topics: Dengue Fever, Tobacco Use and Prevention, Tuberculosis, Alcohol Dependence, Malaria, Nutrition, Hygiene and Sanitation, Physical Activity, Diabetes, Violence Prevention, Heart Health, In-jury Prevention, and Disaster Management

3. THE PROJECT INCUBATOR The last wing of the Adult Changemaker Program is the Project Incubator, which trains and salaries adults with sustainable ideas for community change to develop and run their ideas on either a part-time or full-time basis. We provide funds, education, and mentorship from ideation to implementation. The Project Incuba-tor will focus in 2016 on guiding young adults to develop self-sustaining revenue sources as part of their projects to increase income and finacial stability.

THE PREVENTIVE HEALTH CENTER:

20-year-olds VIjay and Sagar were bothered by a lack of affordable and accessible healthcare resources in low-income communities. Their neighbors couldn’t afford to visit local physicians, so sometimes they’d spend money they didn’t have when their condition didn’t warrant it, and othertimes, they’d wait too long to go because they didn’t know just how sick they were. Vijay and Sagar acquired funding from a donor and training from a physician to launch a Preventive Health Center that gave locals baseline measurements for blood pressure, glucose levels, BMI, cho-lestrol, etc., as well as resources and healthcare services that met their financial bracket. Today, the Preventive Health Center is active in all four slums we work in.

STAGE 3 CURRICULUM (ADULT CHANGEMAKERS)

Here are two examples of projects that have come out of this program:

SUMMER 2015 NUTRITION PROGRAM:

Sheetal Kharvi, a mother of three young children, felt passionate about using her strengths to contribute meaningfully to the health of other kids in her community. Using her talents in cooking, Sheetal launched a summer-long nutrition program and cooked high-nutrient meals for local youth every morning! From upma and poha to burji and diverse pulaos, Sheetal worked to find the perfect balance of taste and nutrition.

THE BALTIMORE PILOTOne of the latest and most exciting developments at The Hero Lab is our global expansion to Baltimore, Maryland in the US.

Early in 2015, our team discovered that the conditions leading to poor mental health amongst at-risk youth were as prevalent glob-ally as they were in India. The vicious cycle of Adverse Childhood Experiences leading to poor psychological well-being leading to high dropouts rates leading to hopelessness was as deeply pres-ent in highly developed economies like the United States.

CITY SPRINGS MIDDLE SCHOOL PILOT

City Springs Elementary/Middle School is a Title I, public charter school oper-ated by the Baltimore Curriculum Project that serves a student population that is over 98% African-American from the projects surrounding the city’s Harbor East region. Title I schools support the education of at-risk, disad-vantaged students. From early September 2015, we have been piloting our Stage 2 curriculum five days a week with around 110 sixth and seventh grade students at City Springs. Our program will wrap up in mid-January. Below are the starting well-being metrics prior to our intervention:

CITY SPRINGS PRELIMINARY DATA

31.5%of Baltimore youth

do not graduate from high school (Maryland

Department of Education). 57.4%

who dropout do so by the eighth grade

(CLASP)

20%of Baltimore residents

will experience a mental health illness

every year (BMHS)

Youth in Baltimore reported lower levels of social cohesion than low-income youth in New Delhi, Johannesberg, Ibadan, and Shanghai. Despite being in the country with the world’s highest GDP, Baltimore youth had some of the worst environ-mental factors leading to poor mental and physical health

outcomes. (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Study)

40%of Baltimore students

are arbitrarily labeled as being

emotionally disturbed or learning disabled, leading to classroom

neglect (Drop Out Nation)

“My students have seen more tragedy and loss in their brief lives than I can even imagine or conceive of in two or three times the years. The deaths number in the dozens, but they sit quietly and figure math problems and read Steinbeck and deal with their pain.”

-Tonya Luster, Baltimore Teacher

WELL-BEING METRIC PERCENTAGE (out of 100)

Curiosity 38.1%

Optimism and Hope 26.5%

Empathy 23.9%

Grit and Resilience 31.9%

Gratitude 29.6%

Meaning in Life 37.2%

General Happiness 38.9%

Personal Growth Initiative 40.8%

CITY SPRINGS MIDDLE SCHOOL PILOT ART INTERVENTIONS

JUBILEE ARTS

Plenty of research shows the power of art in improving mental health. We were curious as to how art-based interventions could improve two specific objectives:

1. Building PERMA: Positive Emotion, Engagement, Positive Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment 2. Inspiring and increasing youth confidence about creating local change

Resource and library teacher Mr. Tiller guiding a student

on how to turn her SMART goals into a project timeline to present to school administration.

A sixth grade team brainstorming how to

create a school outreach campaign

for their fashion club and writing a project

proposal for the principal.

Poster materials for a group’s project to

launch a school science and

innovation team to engage students in

interactive learning.

We partnered with Jubilee Arts, an arts-based nonprofit that serves youth in the Sandtown-Winchester and Upton neighborhoods in Baltimore, to adapt our curriculum into an arts-based intervention. Our big goal was to evaluate whether using the arts could build hope, optimism, meaning, purpose and confidence in a child’s perception of creating community change. Activites in-cluded painting personal portraits of character strengths, building cars from recyclable waste, doing action research in the community using disposable cameras, making “en plen air” drawings of how to transform local problems, and building a collective group 3D map using only local resources of Sand-town reimagined as a “dream community”.

Using a likert scale, we found an 85% average increase in the kids’ per-sonal belief that they could lead meaningful change in their community.

ART INTERVENTIONS

JUHI MELWANI’S SUMMER ART CLASS

Parson’s Fashion Design student Juhi Melwani, originally from Mumbai, spent her 2015 summer break teaching art to youth in the Worli community. While building basic art techniques and approaches, Juhi focused on supplementing what the kids were learning in the Stage 1 curriculum by showing them how art was a form of emotional expression that they could use to communicate their high points, low points, positivity, and negativity in a safe and therapeu-tic way. Using recylable waste to build cars and crowns, designing personal journal covers, and writing gratitude letters to community members, Juhi led her students through an engaging, interactive, and incredibly fun series of classes! The kids surprised her back with their own gratitude letters on the last day of class. While we didn’t evaluate this program through any quantia-tive metrics, the kids’ continued requests for another art program and to have Juhi back as a teacher is a testament to its positive impact. In fact, one of our students, inspired by Juhi, is launching art classes for local youth as her Stage 2 curriculum project!

CHANGEMAKER STORIESMURLI KHARVI, DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS

ANUP CHAURASIYA, COMMUNITY LEADER

Murli Kharvi grew up on the streets of Worli. After dropping out of school in third grade, Murli spent close to a decade in a vicious cycle of local gang life, substance abuse, and chronic depression. We met Murli a year and a half ago at a stage where he was ready to find his purpose. He underwent extensive training in our curriculum to become a Community Leader, at many points doubting his capacity to transform his image as an unem-ployed dropout in his community. With a fire and resilience we’ve seen in few others, Murli pushed himself day in and day out to reach his full potential. Today, Murli is a teacher, leader, and mobilizer, heading up our Mumbai operations and cultivating well-being in hundreds of youth. His drive has also taken him back to college, where he’s studying commerce.

Anup Chaurasiya is from Dharavi, one of the largest slums in the world. Growing up around a perpetual lack of resources, Anup from a young age started to think about how to do more with less, cultivating a spirit of frugal innovation. Committed to a career in the social sector, but wanting to give back directly to his own neighbors, Anup joined our Adult Change-maker Program as a Community Leader in Dharavi. Anup teaches our curriculum to kids in both Dharavi and Ramesh Nagar, and oversees our health, education, and development initiatives in his community. Anup will finish his Bachelors Degree in Science in April.

CHANGEMAKER STORIESRAJESH PATNI, COMMUNITY LEADER

Rajesh Patni, originally from Gujarat, comes from a background as a national-level wrestler. After his mother passed away in his early teens, Rajesh was responsible for supporting a family of five, but never allowed work to stop him from being the best he could at what he loved: sports. Today, Rajesh is a Community Leader in Wadala and Ramesh Nagar, and while teaching and leading, thinks of ways to use athletics as a tool to build community and positive mindsets in kids.

BHARTI SONKUSRE, HEALTH EDUCATOR

Bharti Sonkusre is an 18-year-old from Ramesh Nagar. After studying till eleventh grade, Bharti worked for some time at a small bakery, and then moved to making street lamps to bring home income for a very hard-working family of eight. Curious about ways in which she could give back to her community in an impactful way, Bharti joined our Adult Change-makers as a Community Health Educator in Ramesh Nagar. Not only is she increasing health literacy in her community, she is also showing oth-ers how women are highly capable educators and changemakers!

OUR IMPACT

Community Health Educator Costs

INR 1,15,200USD 1750Community Building Events

INR 1,00,000USD 1500Leadership Training Costs

INR 1,50,000USD 2300Operation Costs

INR 1,68,000USD 2500

2016 MUMBAI BUDGET

73%increase in knowl-edge on Dengueprevention and management.

425householdsreached through health trainings

COMMUNITY HEALTH EDUCATOR IMPACT

2600COMMUNITY

MEMBERSREACHED

380STUDENTS

REACHED IN MUMBAI AND BALTIMORE

2CITIES IN 2

CONTINENTS REACHED

2000individuals screened at Preventive Health Center

STAGE 1 CURRICULUM IMPACT: WORLI PILOT CURIOSITY

+159%GRATITUDE

+166%GENERAL HAPPINESS

+170%

OPTIMISM AND HOPE

+108%MEANING IN LIFE

+145%

EMPATHY

+168%GRIT AND RESILIENCE

+146%

STAGE 2 CURRICULUM IMPACT

15 Student Projects ideated for launch in schools and communities in Worli, Mumbai and Baltimore.

Our total budget for the 2016-2017 annual year is INR 16 lakhs, or USD 24,000. Here’s the breakdown of some of our major program expansion costs:

Community Leader Costs

INR 8,70,000USD 13,000

The community leader costs for the year will allow us to salary high-potential, low-income young adults and expand to a total of ten communities by early 2017.

The community health educator costs for the year will allow us to empower women in ten communities to increase local health literacy.

This budget will allow us to hold events in our communities to increase social cohesion, local relationships, and build community-level happiness.

Our greatest asset is our team. To help our young leaders grow and expand their learning and skillsets, we provide them with leadership training in the form of workshops, trips, and classes.

Operations Costs support the nuts and bolts of what our team does daily, including renting classroom space, and supporting local travel to providing educational materials.

Please help us bring this vision to life! We will be forever grateful.

[email protected]/theherolabtwitter.com/nurtureheroes

A VERY SPECIAL THANKS TO:Pearl, Sadique, and Kyra Qureshi, Lakshmi Sundar, Sundar Sadasivan, and

Sathya Sundar, Ismail Yacoob Moolla, Ramesh Hariharan, Girija Gopalkrishnan and Ramakrishna Gopalkrishnan, Jaya Iyer, Liston D’Mello,

Arjun and Lubna Nagda, Kriti Krishnan, Juhi Melwani, Farzana Dilawar, Shifa Shaikh Wagle, Brenda Texeira, Samina Presswala, Yogita Mehta, Ratan Ginwal-

la, Zubin Sharma, Hetal Khalsa, Anindita Chatterjee, Farheen Thakur, Shilpa Lakhani, Sheinnorn Rodrigues, Shailesh Rege, Joel Gonsalves, Nars Krishnam-

achari, Yeshwanth Gurukarv, Paul Mampilli, Rohan Krishnan, and Sowmya Chepur.